Richard Blanco Visiting Writers Program - Book Reading & Reception

Richard Taylor will be sharing poems from his latest book titled The Absence of Strangers (Goose River Press, 2017) on Tuesday, February 27th at 7:00 p.m. in Bingham Auditorium at Gould Academy. A reception and book signing will follow at 8:00 p.m. at the Head of School Home. 

These poems go looking for the stranger in ourselves, the one with whom we would like to dance gracefully over the earth, then follow inside to our interior selves. There we ponder life’s solitudes, its various rejections, exult in our successes, as fleeting as they are. But there too imagination sparks our love for the puzzling beauty in ourselves and others. We discover as well that a true self is given boldly to that captivating world, and we cannot escape. So it is that our joys reveal themselves as both profound and tenuous, and without end. These poems report that oldest and latest news.

Richard Taylor grew up in rural New Hampshire. His education came from Dartmouth, the University of Kiel (Fulbright Fellowship), and Yale. He has been a teacher of German language and literature in colleges, Latin and English as well at private secondary schools. A member of the 1964 Olympic Nordic Ski Team and for many years a staff coach with the National Team, he was variously a construction worker, ski touring center designer and operator, and for twenty years (through 2007) a teacher of German, Latin, and English and a running and cross-country ski coach at Gould. He and his wife Sally live happily right here in Bethel.