World Underneath

An intimate second book of poemsRichard Tayson's second book of poems, The World Underneath, concerns birth, motherhood, explorations of the feminine in a world scarred by war, environmental crisis, and violence. The book's locus is a series of poems related to a home birth, an event that leads the poems' speaker to question the place of the individual within the home, the world, and the wider universe. All things connect, as the speaker travels cross-country to the birth then back to where he lives in a multiracial relationship of two men committed to each another. The book's widest aim is to unite the personal and the universal, the masculine and the feminine, the gay and the non-gay. As they explore the crucial dilemmas of our time, Tayson's poems probe beneath ordinary experience to discover the ineffable and the difficult-to-say, the space between what we know and what remains distant, unreachable.