barely breathing

Description

Published by March Street Press
2010
200 pages

Excerpt from a review of barely breathing, published in Small Press Review, written by poetry critic Kirby Congdon:

“We all wonder in a quiet moment of reflection at the phenomenon of existence, of being alive, at being who we are in the middle of it all, feeling and thinking as we do. Mr. Taylor, aka Spiel’s stance is to move us to the outer edge of it all where we are spinning on the rim of the phonograph record, or in the complexity of the compact disc or among the molecules packed in the memory bank of the computer as he drags in the capacity for intelligence, that awareness of knowledge of life that can look in the mirror and see the endless vista before us reflected in back of us as far as the eye can see. The Christian Bible sums it up beyond the grammar of normal English in the assertion, “I am that I am” where the first person pronoun is both the private individual clinging to his identity and the totality of the universe which our senses take in and make real. For me, this is Spiel’s stance from many angles – not an answer, or a solution, or a doctrine. It is an insight that absorbs science, history and experience, along with the compulsion to put it into words, whether we are thoughtful poet or attendants speaking spontaneously in a hospital ward.”ngdon: