Since early in her career, Mrs. Taylor had garnered critical praise from distinguished poets and critics such as Randall Jarrell, one of her early mentors. In 2010, she won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for her body of work.
Mrs. Taylor grew up on a farm in North Carolina, and echoes of country speech and rural folkways often found their way into her poetry.
Although she didn’t consider herself an overtly feminist writer, she often depicted the weariness of women’s lives, as in “Disappearing Act,’’ published in 2009 in her final book, “Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008’’:
No, the soul doesn’t leave the body. My body is leaving my soul. Tired of turning fried chicken and coffee to muscle and excrement, tired of secreting tears, wiping them, tired of opening eyes on another day, tired especially of that fleshy heart, pumping, pumping.
Reviewing Mrs. Taylor’s 1972 collection “Welcome Eumenides’’ in The New York Times, poet Adrienne Rich wrote that her poems “speak of the underground life of women . . . coping, hoarding, preserving, observing, keeping up appearances, seeing through the myths and hypocrisies, nursing the sick, conspiring with sister-women, possessed of a will to survive and to see others survive.’’
Mrs. Taylor often wrote in a deliberately fragmented style, balanced between free verse and more formal poetic techniques. She occasionally invented words - “bemiracled,’’ “scissorly-wise,’’ “disfestooned’’ - for her flinty, dry-eyed poems.
“I just make up words,’’ she said in a 1997 interview with the Southern Review. “Sometimes it’s just for the cadence, the real word wouldn’t fit; sometimes it seems I just need a word.’’
Eleanor Lilly Ross was born near Norwood, N.C. She published her first poems in a local newspaper when she was a girl.
Her two brothers became published novelists, and her sister, Jean Ross, who now lives in Iowa City, Iowa, is a short story writer and the widow of poet Donald Justice.
