The Flying Change
by Henry Taylor
Summary
The Flying Change takes its title from a dressage maneuver, a horse changing its leading leg at a canter without breaking stride, and Henry Taylor builds the whole collection around that image of controlled transition. The poems return again and again to rural Virginia, where Taylor grew up, and to the specific, disciplined work of training and riding horses, using that vocabulary, balance, yielding, the exact moment a horse commits to a new lead, as a way of thinking about family, aging, and the passages of an ordinary life moving into middle age.
Taylor writes in careful, traditional stanzas and meter, at a moment when a great deal of American poetry had turned toward free verse, and the collection argues implicitly that inherited form still has real work to do: a strict stanza can hold a memory of a father or a horse's exact gait with a precision looser lines might lose. The equestrian material never stays merely technical. A horse learning to change leads becomes, across the book, a recurring figure for any difficult shift a person has to make without stopping to think it through, a marriage, a loss, the slow adjustments of getting older.
Reading The Flying Change rewards a reader who enjoys formal craft for its own sake as much as its subject matter, someone willing to notice how a rhyme lands or a stanza turns. It suits anyone drawn to poetry rooted in a specific rural place and a specific, demanding physical skill, and it makes a strong case that traditional form, far from being a limitation, can carry as much contemporary feeling as any looser style.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Henry Taylor the 1986 Prize for Poetry for The Flying Change, published by Louisiana State University Press, over finalists Andrew Hudgins's Saints and Strangers and Charles Simic's Selected Poems, 1963 to 1983, the same Simic who would win the prize himself four years later. Taylor was born in Lincoln, Virginia, and earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia and a master's degree from Hollins College before beginning a long teaching career.
From 1971 to 2003 Taylor co directed the graduate creative writing program at American University in Washington, D.C., training generations of younger poets while continuing to publish his own formally exacting work. He received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters over the course of his career.