Search results for ""Author Maria Taylor""

Dressing for the Afterlife is a diamond-tough and tender second collection of poems from British Cypriot poet Maria Taylor, which explores love, life, and how we adapt to the passage of time. From the steely glamour of silent film-star goddesses to moonlit seasons and the ghosts of other possible, parallel lives, these poems shimmy and glimmer bittersweet with humour and brio, as Taylor conjures afresh a world where Joan Crawford feistily simmers and James Bond’s modern incarnation is mistaken for an illicit lover. Consistently crisp and vivid, these poems examine motherhood, heritage and inheritance, finding stories woven in girlhood’s faltering dance-steps, the thrum of the sewing-machine at the end-days of the rag trade, or the fizz and bubble of a chip-shop fryer. And throughout, breaking through, is the sense of women finding their wings and taking flight - “and her wings, what wings she has” - as Taylor’s own poems soar and defiantly choose their own adventures.

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Read a sample poem for free - just click the Extracts tab above.Shortlisted for the 2013 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.In her debut collection, Melanchrini, Maria Taylor's distinctive poetry slips fluently amidst the worlds and underworlds of classical mythology and modernity; between her own Greek Cypriot heritage and British urban upbringing; among betting shops, schools, bar-rooms and hospitals. Lively and ebullient, from moments of quirky humour to poignancy, these poems demonstrate a poet who isn't afraid to leap into the heart of circumstance and treasure what she finds there. Melanchrini finds personal histories at the kitchen table, tears in the soapsuds, and a moment's sensuality in the midst of a city market. Maria Taylor's poems are deceptively plucky; as entertaining as they are inventive and quietly determined. "Enjoyable, engaging, serious but unpretentious, confident and well-crafted, this is a debut collection that should attract attention – and ought to win Maria Taylor a lot of readers. Above all the book is full of life, of real lives. It has variety and surprise but is very clearly by one voice – a voice that it is good to listen to because it sees so much."Peter Sansom"Maria Taylor's poems sing with the extraordinary in the everyday, full of those moments where something or someone is briefly transformed: a woman takes a merman home; a dead Aunt's house becomes a museum where the main object is missing; the memory of morning coffee is full of birds' wings. The power of these poems is that they constantly invoke the unexpected, and the colours and textures of both times past and yet to come."Deborah Tyler-Bennett "This is a distinctive and assured collection of poems. The writing is at once clear-sighted and fully realised. In its mystery, precision and surprise, Melanchrini shows the truth of a powerful new writer."David MorleyMaria Taylor is a Leicestershire-based poet. Her writing has been published in The North, The Guardian, the TLS, Staple and others.

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