Late leisure

In the fifty-five poems that compose Late Leisure, Eleanor Ross Taylor shares dramatic, symbolic, intensely personal outpourings of her evolving consciousness - "myself capriciously ongoing" - as poet, woman, and elder. Though she has written throughout her life, it is now, in later years, that she blooms fullest, free of wifely and motherly occupations that nonetheless nurtured her artistry. Taylor's is a distinctly southern voice, audible in references to gardens and social ties and in folksy turns of phrase. But she wears a tremendously wide range of attitudes - confidence, independence, amazement, sarcasm, revery, faith - a fascinating, reassuring testimony to vitality.