The Presence of Things Past

John Taylor is an American writer, critic, and translator who was born in Des Moines in 1952. He studied mathematics at the University of Idaho (graduating in 1974), then literature and philosophy at the University of Hamburg (Germany), where he was a Rotary International Fellow. He is the author of eleven volumes of short prose and poetry. His most recent titles include The Dark Brightness (Xenos Books), Grassy Stairways (The MadHat Press), Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees (The Bitter Oleander Press), and a "double book" co-authored with Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges (The Fortnightly Review). Many of his books have been translated into French, four into Italian, and one into Serbian, while selected poems, stories, and essays have appeared in a dozen other languages. Taylor has also translated some of the key Modern Greek, Italian, and especially French poets. His essays on European literature have been gathered in five volumes by Transaction Publishers (now Routledge): A Little Tour through European Poetry, Into the Heart of European Poetry, and the three-volume Paths to Contemporary French Literature. He has lived in France since 1977. After living in Paris until 1987, he moved to Angers, in the lower Loire Valley.

Collecting stories from John Taylor's upbringing in Des Moines, these "charming evocations of a Midwestern childhood" (as the French film director Louis Malle called them), recall an "average" neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s. The death of the author's mother gives rise to these sensitive reminiscences, which also conjure up first loves, playmates, and a motley assortment of true-to-life characters who express their modest joys and lasting secret sorrows. The Presence of Things Past (the title alludes to the eleventh book of the Confessions of Saint Augustine), is a tribute to a lost mother, a lost neighborhood, a lost city, and a lost childhood.