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Cluster index: John Taylor

The crossable.

By John Taylor. Paintings by Marc Feld. • 1 behind you, not ahead, a gap that only your gaze could span and that you’ve now long crossed 2 behind you, not ahead, remain the wounds you still see ahead on the uncommitted sky 3 stitches removed too soon, yet they had sealed the essential, left […]

Last poems.

 By Béatrice Douvre. Translated by John Taylor. ◊  arewell to inset words, to glorious words. Here, a place drunk with blossoming, the enameled field of living. The green water is a face effaced by confines. Farewell to inset words, to glorious words; the voices change, the sad steeples shift while floating. Snow in the brown […]

A sowing of the sky.

Nine fragments for Juan Carlos Ceci. By Franca Mancinelli. Translated from the Italian by John Taylor.   he rain—dense fabric in which we are generated from a warm color and a cold color. la pioggia—tessuto fitto dove siamo generati da un colore caldo e un colore freddo. ◊ ater bears fruit on the picked stems […]

The goddess of emptiness.

By Jean Frémon. Translated by John Taylor.   E WERE ALONE in the gardens of the hotel, awaiting fruit cocktails that were not arriving. After the many years that I have come to this country, I should know that time is not the same here as elsewhere, that showing one’s impatience is the height of […]

In memory of

By JOHN TAYLOR.  with drawings by Sam Forder.   a tree trying to take root in the chilly air while you sit on a branch in its crown along the wet ground and breathe deeply • another tree stands on the same muddy bank the surrogate shore the trembling reflection of its needles in backwater […]

From ‘Corot’s Walk’.

John Taylor: ‘Did Corot have a story to tell? Nearly all his paintings tell of the absence of a memorable story: only a mother and her child, only two peasant women gathering herbs or flowers, only a peasant leading his cow down the road.’

A prevailing darkness.

John Taylor: ‘Surely mysterious, intriguing, vivid vestiges are excavated and brought to the light of the printed page, but equally visible, as it were, remains the prevailing darkness.’

A Moral Story.

Jean Frémon: ‘Around 1640, in Amsterdam, a ship’s chandler, who had become rich through the development of shipping companies, commissioned a portrait of his wife from a reputed local painter. ‘You must paint her as she is because this is how I love her’, the merchant had advised.’

from ‘Dialyzing’.

Charline Lambert: ‘She fluctuates, frees her contours, draws watersheds in quicksand.

No properties, except those of all the chemical elements she synthesizes.’

José-Flore Tappy and poems from a country within a country.

José-Flore Tappy: ‘The Mediterranean, the arid lands, the most deserted landscapes, or the poorest landscapes. This is where my imagination goes and where I recover my roots. I have spent many moments of my life on one of the Balearic islands, and I came of age in the midst of an environment that was at once solar and maritime’

To Field Flowers.

John Taylor on Philippe Jaccottet: ‘His writings show us how to invert our hesitations, our trembling, our distress into worthy, beneficial sources that can open once again like a flower after the night, after the early morning frost.’

Nine poems.

Veroniki Dalakoura :’From the pile of rubbish, you went up with your dual essence, with what ultimately gives substance to the quest of man. Melodies were heard everywhere. Heaps, a pile of dirt, indeed dried-up earth. A fruitless search. Voices, joyful screams—what little songs—all together bleating with moans.’

Pierre Chappuis. 6 January 1930 – 22 December 2020.

John Taylor: ‘Beginning two years after my first meeting with Pierre in Vevey, and after I had spent a few hours with him twice in Paris, my wife Françoise and I would sometimes detour up to Neuchâtel on our long drive back to Angers, after visiting her mother in Aix-les-Bains. We would stay for a night at the Hôtel des Arts, around the corner from Pierre and Geneviève’s ground-floor apartment on the rue des Beaux-Arts.’

Pages from the Croatian Notebook.

Franca Mancinelli: ‘My body has an open texture from which hangs a thread. Someone at the other end, without even noticing, pulls it, and slowly I grow thin. The absence beckons me. I approach the spirits of the cold, that white wordless nucleus which governs this earth. I close my eyes, as if pervaded by a flat colorless sea.
I’m starting to translate snow…

Eight poems from ‘Mala kruna’.

Franca Mancinelli: ‘The morgue is a calm lake: the boats
oval like a woman’s seed,
the flesh where a son ever sleeps.’