The poems in his newest collection contain a close, almost scientific, attention to detail. This is a collection that delves into the truth of beauty, evanescence and life through communion with the natural world. [ . . . ] What a gift to spend some time with Keith Taylor in The Bird-while.
~Kelly Fordon, Michigan Bookmark via Stateside with Cynthia Canty on Michigan Public Radio
There is a gracious movement throughout these poems. They gain purchase in the heart and mind, and settle there to charm and sing and give pure pleasure. Birdsong as poetry. A rare feat. A gorgeous book.
~Lorna Goodison, poet
Taylor’s poems are never heavy-handed but use observation and facts to explore our relationship to the earth: both showcasing our problematic historical relationship and also modeling how to relate deeply in the present moment.
~Natalie Tomlin, New Pages
I’ve loved Keith Taylor’s poems for almost 40 years. I invite you to find out why.
~John Repp, Erie Reader
These poems exhibit a maturity of voice and mastery of craft not often found in contemporary poetry. Taylor seems to have done the long, hard work of discovering how to make the simple profound and the profound simple. It turns out that a bird-while is the exact time needed to fully live within a timeless moment.
~Marc Beaudin
Longtime readers of Keith Taylor's work will be glad to have this new harvest of poems. Keith weaves together poems both from different periods in his life and from among his wide array of interests, bringing the whole of it seamlessly together. As must be the case with any writer who has reached Keith's age, the theme—largely unremarked upon but clearly present—is time. A 'bird-while,' that all-too-fleeting moment a birder has to make his identification and observations of a sighting—is brief and fraught with urgency, like our own brief moment of life, a blurry speck in the onrush of centuries.
~Richard Tillinghast
In The Bird-while, Keith Taylor spills a pouch of polished and found bits of knowledge clearly carried with him until they were just right and ready to be shared. Lessons of life and extinction mingle with a rhythmic reverence for continuity. Between city places and wild spaces, Taylor sheds a poem-light of passionate observation. He notices not just the sip of the hummingbird, but the pause between sips; not just the arrival of a sprout, but the fire that changed the earth it rises from. These are poems that place humanity in perspective, in a time and place dependent on understanding new ways to measure. I suspect a few birds have come to his feeders not just to eat seeds, but to read over his shoulder.
~Margaret Noodin
As, in Keith Taylor's poetry, his 'house contains mountains / and rivers and crimson sunbirds' while, behind a postwar subdivision, still sits a man 'on a large rock, a glacial / erratic' who chips 'a stone point from a piece of chert' — so, as a seer and a reader and a thinker and a watcher, this poet brings to us visions from far beyond the ordinary world, peels away the layers and the limits, breathes life into the imaginary, makes the mystery tangible. Keith Taylor has not only lingered in the bird-while, seeing what others have missed, he has seen this world with a bird's eye-view, as well. So, in this, his most brilliantly shimmering book to date, we are transported and awakened and changed. Taylor's poetry gives us the most important gift that art has to offer: a transcendence of the quotidian, a glimpse far beyond what we'd assumed were the limits of our human understanding. His genius for the poetic is not only in music and imagery but in his generosity, his courage. He goes to places only real poetry goes, and he takes us along. The Bird-while is not only a beautiful and memorable, charming and frightening and startling book, it is a crucial one.
~Laura Kasischke