Bücher von Julie Taylor

The poems of Julie Taylor burn indelibly on the retina of the soul-you can't but see and feel their fire long after the page has been turned, the book put down. From the wonders of the natural world, it's rhythms, beauties, deaths; to the heat of bodies in desire and the death of her partner by fire; and the shards of grief held in fragments of the body, Taylor shows us, poem after poem, in rich spare language (like the loam of earth) how what breaks regenerates and "how flesh and fire are human."-Alison GranucciIn What We Keep Within The Living, Julie Taylor brings us a clear poetic voice that speaks a ravishingly lush language of precise emotion. We enter her story "Remembering Roses" in which she momentarily dwells on a tattoo on her deceased lover's shoulder. In a deft turn, now in a rose garden, reaching for the transcendent, she sees "how ants decorate the dead." Or later, in a poem that makes clear her lover died in a fire, she ends with, "burns these words and this song,/ the rooster crowing another dawn." Such turns of hope and optimism populate this book that breathes with life, breathes life into mourning, and language into life.-Owen LewisTrauma and beauty, love and horror have been the subject of great poetry since the early Greeks. Julie Taylor raises it out of myth into reality transforming the line, the image and the general thrust of this book into great art. Who is this poet and why haven't we heard from her before? A useless question, if there ever was one. She's here now and it's not going to stop. This well is deep; this art is fully mature. Expect more!-Fran Quinn

Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera is the history of a Muslim colony in the southern Italian city of Lucera during the Middle Ages. Author Julie Taylor draws on a vast array of primary sources, unpublished manuscripts, and archeological data to provide a detailed account of the lives of Muslims against the backdrop of the social and political complexities of medieval Lucera. Taylor's work illuminates the legal and social status of Muslims in Christendom and the contributions made by Muslims to the economy and defense of the kingdom of Sicily, and it also yields noteworthy insights into Muslim-Christian relations. Muslims in Medieval Italy is a thoroughly researched and absorbing account.