Knotbrook Taylor
poet and photographer
The Year of the Lark
Knotbrook Taylor's new collection The Year of the Lark is available now from Erbacce Press.
The book, set up as a series of cantos, represents the poet's personal experience of the first full lockdown of the Covid pandemic year 2020. Between March and July of that year he wrote a piece every day responding to what was going on around him. The cantos represent small parts of what he thinks of as one long poem. During this time he was an inspector of care homes who was grounded, yet still kept in touch with what was going on in the homes via the phone. He also had a lot of time on his hands which enabled him to explore the geography and nature of his local rural area in the east of Scotland.
These cantos show a journey through self-discovery, politics, love, death and nature. The cantos evolve as time goes by, as the poet becomes more and more immersed in an escape into the natural world. Suddenly he had time on his hands to ponder his own mortality but also to observe the detail of nature, often with his partner Edith. The journey is part autobiographical, part diary, part poetry. It represents one man's chronicle of this difficult time shared with the rest of the world.
