Taibl has published most frequently in fields of nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry. In the following essay, she discusses revolution of the political and literary variety in "The Milkfish Gatherers."

"The Milkfish Gatherers" is a poem about revolution. In it, James Fenton uses the political history of the Filipino independence quest as an extended metaphor to illustrate literary revolution. Fenton crosses divides of form and subject matter, bringing contemporary ideas to a traditional verse form and foreign lands to universal assimilation. Fenton is a political poet whose first concern is language. In "The Milkfish Gatherers," he marries the political to the private, the form to chaos, and the past to a vital future.

Fenton's sense of past begins with the form of his poetry. Fenton has said, in an interview with the reviewer Ian Parker in an article for the New Yorker, that his feeling is "that poetry...