The poetry of Eleanor Ross Taylor has been acclaimed for decades by such poets as Randall Jarrell, Richard Howard, and Adrienne Rich. Now fifteen poets and critics join those luminaries in celebrating her distinct and dazzling poems in this collection of essays edited by Jean Valentine. A beacon for Southern writers, feminists, and those who hunger for a linguistically rich and musical poetry, Eleanor Ross Taylor is, as Adrienne Rich has said, one of the poetic "lighthouse keepers" of the century. "Eleanor Taylor is a national treasure, a major figure among the generations of American poets, one who deserves our full appreciation and gratitude. The Lighthouse Keeper, a gathering of gifted poets and critics celebrating her art, each viewing it from a different angle, adds directly to our pleasure and understanding of her extraordinary accomplishment. She has given us a lifetime's wealth of wonderful poems, and it is an honor for me enthusiastically to recommend this "first bright book of homage," The Lighthouse Keeper, to serious readers everywhere."-George Garrett For decades, Elanor Ross Taylor's remarkable poems have followed the mind's passionate and peculiar motion, extending a classical Modernist tradition to the underground life of women, loosing raw nerves, dangerous loyalty, bitter love, and trust in disruption, hesitation, silence. These essays recognize Taylor's habit of thinking and speaking-her vividly strange, brilliantly complex, elegant and colloquial collages-as necessary to our measure of contemporary poetry. This is an essential book for and about an essential poet.-Joyce Peseroff