About a Natural God

Sam Taylor. Body of the World. Ausable Press. 2005.

Editors (which often means the poets themselves) of first books of poetry have a habit of announcing either an aesthetic or a relationship to the world in the first poem of the collection, and Taylor’s book follows suit with “Surfacing.” This poem establishes the poet’s identification with all of the world on a grand scale. In the midst of images about San Francisco, Memphis, and the Atlantic Ocean, and a man sleeping on a steam grate, Taylor writes,

[…]

and this awareness also, tossed about,

like something drowning, or almost born;

that all of it is one body,

my body. This web of ache that pulls

against the heart, is the heart, the skin,

the world.

This poem is lyric as ars poetica and poetic motive. Throughout the book, Taylor communicates with a nearly Whitmanian expansive identification with the world. I say *nearly* because Whitman identified with people, while Taylor’s relationship to the world reminds me more of Crane’s relationship to America… but I am getting ahead of myself. First I should write more about the poems.

That “Surfacing” appears in the first position in the first section titled “Anonymous” is both a fortunate and unfortunate choice editorially and aesthetically. (Yes. I’m going to be a bit contradictory in this review.) I say fortunately because the reader easily receives and digests the intended message in a skillfully rendered form, but unfortunately because the same message is better delivered in “Arc,” the second poem in the collection, and a better, more complex piece of versification (yeah, I said it: versification). “Arc” is the expansive poem with a display of technique: it is Whitman and Crane all at once; it is love and violence; it is science and art; it jackhammers to orchids; it is change in children’s pockets to the mouths of fish. It is fifty lines in five-line stanzas with alternating long and short lines of a biblical plain style that it seems displays Taylor’s talents best: a classic high—late-modern poetic voice with a deep connection to physical and linguistic structure that allows the one time to savor the images though they quickly pass in front of the one’s consciousness. Sample:

When she leaves, it will be because of a complex equation,

a calculus that includes

measurements of how the barges lift the bay, the change

at dusk in children’s pockets,

angles of first hallways, additions and subtractions

of plovers, sandpipers. Or something simple and inscrutable

as the surface of a circle—

the digits of pi will follow her down unrepeating streets

past crates of oranges, gaping

mouths of fish, into other rooms, books that you will never read.

See what I mean? Of course you do. Great stuff there. And, of course, it is this tension between the first two poems that defines the tension (as problem) of the book for me: that sometimes the poetry reaches the heights of poetic language and vision it aspires to, and sometimes not.

***

“Anonymous” the first section of the book, is defined by wind, simply because wind is so regularly used as a transitive image, in the poems “Arc,” “The Lost World,” “John 3:16,” “Hologram,” and “Anonymous.” Wind, in fact, occurs often throughout the book, and resembles the hand of God: the movement of the wind in Taylor’s poems creates both stillness and mutability. Taylor’s images are always on the move, in the sense that the poet’s eye is always moving from one image to another, and never settles for very long, even in “John 3:16,” which is, structurally speaking, a narrative poem:

                            […] Because God so loved the world,

he wanted to be a girl with red ribbons,

     a blue Minnie Mouse watch, even if then

he had to forget, to live amongst all the forgetting—

     the tv talk show, the uncle, to watch him every day

through the smell of corn. Because He so loved the world,

     he was willing even to be that fat man

lying on the conch eating chicharones,

     scratching his balls, chafed red from the quarry,

because the white light just goes on forever.

In this poem the fat man is the uncle who molests the little girl, Taylor’s message being the bible verse. This poet explores Christian themes in his poetry honestly enough, and following Christian doctrine, that one can read his belief system in the poetry. This is true of the whole collection: Taylor’s Cranian/ Whitmanian project to identify with the world is emotionally compelling, and includes the reader, such as in the poem “Anonymous:”

Now, I am a Venetian boatman.

Now, a Laotian farmer

standing in the doorway, watching the rain.

Now, I press my rifle into a line

of Jews, beg them to move right, then left.

And Mary watches His hand’s shadows

fall across the wall

wondering if it will touch hers.

Here, the references to the holocaust and the immaculate conception occur as part of the poet’s empathy for others. It is this enacting, as in the poem “Anonymous,” of the poetic and empathetic project of identification that really interests me in Taylor’s work.

***

Taylor’s images rarely, if ever, depart from reality, and limits of what his physical eye may or may not see. “Accident,”—in the second section of the book, titled, “Listen”—is a lesson in description and imagery and devotion to reality. “Accident,” like “John 3:16,” has an underlying narrative structure, which seems to be one of Taylor’s best poetic structures (I’m thinking here of “Matinée,” “Sunday Morning,” “Background,” and “Walking”) but Taylor’s poems are most often associative meditations. In “Human Geography,” the poem closest to a title poem, the images are organized in groups of two tercets, each group separated by a star.

If I can hold the word inside the dreaming

Not as an act of certainty, but of

Knowing nonetheless—a hand stretched out

In the dark, feeling the stone wall, plum tree_

The constant remembrance of the fragile

Prostrating before us, I can feel calm.

*

Watching invisible angles we call

Physics walk the clouds out over the edge

Of the word, like a boy walking a horse

To find water—never getting there,

Never tiring either. Fall meadow, spring onions.

Nobody knows where they are going.

Here, the images are forward-leaning; it implies and requires a hint of progression, either through the syllogistic grammatical structure of the first six lines above, or through the narrative impetus of the boy walking the horse in the second six lines. In either case, the material of the poem requires that we follow-through to the sentence’s end, or to the next sentence. This seems to be when Taylor’s associative powers are working the best, but he pushes his poetic chops in “After Charon: a Late Aubade,” for example. The images in “After Charon” are uncharacteristically (for this collection) odd and cliché. This sort of thing happens in a few other poems (“Coda: for Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “Notes to Organic Knowing”) when Taylor pushes away from a familiar grammatical structure and begins to rely on tropes introduced without enough context for them to convey real meaning. But these poems appear infrequently enough.

***

The collection begins to lose cohesion in the third and last section, “Sculpture with One Wing.” Taylor’s themes continue here, most successfully in and the fine poem “Walking,” and less so in the unfortunately titled “Shifting Ambiguities of Soil,” but the poems are so diverse in aesthetics that some should be part of a different collection, or in a different part this collection, especially “Basics (1/400^th Shutter Speed),” and “Next.” Two poems in this section that agree aesthetically with the rest of the collection are just not strong enough poems to have been include in the book at all: “Walking with Chloe,” and “Rain.” These problems give the section the feeling that it was the holding-pen for the weaker poems that were never cut.

That Sam Taylor’s first collection is, like many first collections, a bit messy editorially or aesthetically, is easily over-looked by the careful reader. The first two poems are conveniently paired for comparison by their placement in the collection, and point to an underlying issue that every poet struggles with, and which can be read in Taylor’s work here. Do we know what is our best or weakest work? Do we need someone else to tell us? Do we, as readers, simply luck into work we like or do not like? I cannot conclusively answer those questions through Sam Taylor’s work, I’m afraid. I know there are moments when I am merely satisfied with his work, but many others when I admire it. There is much to admire in Taylor’s Body of the World: his poetry has an expansive relationship to the world, language, and humanity, and his voice is unambiguously tinged with empathy and compassion. May the desire to be a thoroughly different kind of poet never over-run him.

— Pablo Peschiera