Description
The most comprehensive book about the life, the art and the writing of Tom Taylor aka The Poet Spiel aka Thoss W Taylor
“In his Revealing Self in Pictures and Words, Tom Taylor (aka the marvelous Poet Spiel) has given us his magnum opus, a revelatory memoir unlike any other, brimming with breathtaking textual and explosive visual images. A son of the Great Plains, a farm boy already a budding artist, a maverick, and gay, we feel the excruciating strictures of the closeted 1940s. Taylor allows us entry to his beautifully rendered inner agonies and mirror-dancing pleasures. We are privy to his deepest secrets and grateful recipients of his lifetime accumulation of wisdom and advice. In gorgeous reproductions he shows us those first sketches of his cloistered farm world, and then like rings in a tree, we witness Taylor’s growth as an artist. His vision is sometimes whimsical, sometimes realistic, and often wildly surrealistic as if Baudelaire and Rimbaud had painted as well as written. This book is for the coffee table and the ages.”
Stephanie Dickinson. Author, Editor, Publisher Rain Mountain Press.
“I say no one writes like Spiel…incantational, confrontational, emotional, liturgical, hallucinatory, multifarious, autobiographical, extraordinary, malicious and delicious.”
Alan Catlin. Poet, Editor Misfit Magazine.
“Tom-Thoss-Taylor aka Spiel has produced work fulfilling all the definitions of art. Through time (he) has moved from the obvious–naturalistic rendering to the most difficult art form of the contemporary scene: concept–based expression that is intimately allied to an individual’s life experience.”
Dr. William Folkestad, Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, CSU-Pueblo.
“(Spiel) challenges the current tendency of small press poets to do little else but reaffirm the pedestrian nature of life. Spiel refuses to produce small, tasty commodities that gloss, harmonize, and freeze frame…in an audacious language of struggle, a language of talkback which invades, ignites, and possibly even transforms the reader.”
Don Winter. Small Press Poet, Educator
“Tom Taylor is like a human prism. The facets of his art mark achievements many artists fear as well as envy.”
Rocky Mountain News, Jennifer Heath.
“In poems that can be ‘heard,’ even on the page, Spiel begins with subject matter of the most intimate kind and expresses this experience in elemental language, raising the volume in a way that puts the reader in the author’s place.”
David Chorlton. Small Press Poet, Artist.
“Tom Taylor, aka The Poet Spiel is a painter and a poet, who has struggled bravely with mental illness his entire life. Both facets of his art have survived this struggle. The integrity and richness of his art sings to us with an originality and vitality that not only has survived and transcends the pain of his mental illness, but will live for future generations to contemplate and enjoy.”
Raymond Keen – Retired Psychologist, Poet, Playwright.
“(Taylor’s)…strong imagery…The works reflect the pop culture of two decades, and the eloquent thoughts, ideas and musings of an artist who has been no wide-eyed Candide but has repeatedly returned to the beauty of the world after feeling its pain.”
Phyllis Walbye. Reporter Herald Art Writer, Editor.
“With tough-guy bluntness, a wicked sense of humor, and a haiku-like economy of words, Spiel sketches characters so real you can smell their sweat… This is queer poetry without aesthetic preciousness or airbrushed bodies.”
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.