Poetry. A slim volume of minimalist verse that takes the reader on an exploration of unfamiliar terrain with the senses heightened. It is quiet and sensitive; one perceives and feels every drop, shadow and ray of light. The mood is enhanced by black and white graphics produced by three French artists--Sibylle Baltzer, Nelly Buret and Caroline Francois- Rubino--and one Greek -- Dimitris Souliotis. THE DARK BRIGHTNESS represents a turn in John Taylor's writing. Known for his short prose evoking his childhood in Des Moines and his adult life in France, where he has long lived, Taylor is now writing short, meditative, almost 'pre-Socratic' poems arranged into sequences and focused on existential issues: a man's relationship to language (and foreign language), to nature, to his personal past, and to his future death. At the heart of this volume, with these various themes, is an attempt to reproduce essential moments when something--a phenomenon in the outer world, or a thought, an emotion, a sensation--comes into being, emerges into visibility, into awareness, something that was previously within a darkness, or was perhaps itself the darkness. --Jeremy Alden