At 54 poems and less than 80 pages of text, you might be forgiven for assuming that Cities Within Us, Peter Taylor’s latest collection of poetry, will be a fast read. You would be wrong. Even before I’ve done no more than scan the contents page and count poems, I have the feeling that this will be a dense, even rich experience, based on my reading of his previous work, Hell-box (a 25-page chapbook published by Frog Hollow Press in 2020. (Who could resist a work entitled Hell-box, right?)
As a title, Cities Within Us is less dramatic but equally enticing. And on reading Sabyasachi Nag’s interview of Taylor, I found what the poet thinks of his own collections of works. Taylor says, “I’ve always thought of my books as a small constellation of different stars.” The title of this review mirrors his own words.
Taylor describes his recurring themes as “life, death, beauty, destruction, war, time, cities” and goes on to say, “our different experiences create our different worlds. We live within the cities we imagine and inhabit.” Our lives as constructs made from memory. Agree.
“Our different experiences create our different worlds. We live within the cities we imagine and inhabit.”
Peter Taylor
Part I is called “Glyphs & Biographies.” A glyph is a sign, right? Oh, Peter Taylor, making me look stuff up again! I get up to retrieve the dictionary from where it is stacked with the thesaurus on my desk, under a painting propped up against the wall. The painting falls forward (not the first time), knocking over a small, already chipped China dog that was my mother’s. I return to the sofa. The cat reintegrates with my lap.
Glyph: The first two meanings refer to architecture. Well, maybe that’s what Taylor had in mind, ’cause the book is called Cities, etc. Third entry: A symbol (“as a curved arrow on a road sign”) that conveys information nonverbally. Okay, I think we’re there. Let’s see.
“Hell-box” (the individual poem, not the chapbook; some of the poems from the 2020 work reappear in Cities) begins with a boast: “I am the beginning of language.” The box, meant to hold printer’s type, goes on, claiming, “My guts fashioned / the invincible Roman / from a cauldron of impurities: angular face, trim beard, spine / like a ramrod / from shoulder to foot.” The “Roman” is the ubiquitous font Times New Roman, which I used to type this review. Though there is redemption from empire in the next verse. “Bodies of every sort / emerge / from my fire.”
The next poem, “The Man Who Ate His Boots,” about John Franklin’s last doomed Arctic expedition, shows one cost of empire, as the shipmates starved and froze to death, reading books like The Vicar of Wakefield from the ship’s library. What must that have been like?
In “Abandonment of the Bees,” we get a glimpse of a world where females withdraw their unpaid labour, “…weary of choosing between / children and the golden sacrifice,” aka honey, rhymed with money. “Freedom spread like a virus,” and “It was like a ghost town.”
Some may find the sonnet “The Indifference of Stars” unbearable to read. Warning: a more elegant description of domestic rape and victim despair has not been written. Its language captures a cold, cold climate, particularly the last line: “and drag her down to darkness, afraid, alone.” Likewise, “Desire Needs No Image” is about a child being photographed for porn. What good do these poems do? No good exactly, except the salute offered by the powerless witness to the victim.
Thank goodness for the next poem, “Equus & Anima,” a beautiful vignette of rider and mount in which “she turns him / effortlessly / with the enduring gentleness of her will.” Oh, noble horse to be so turned! If only ’twas more common. Still, it offers some hope that brute strength may not always come with unrestrained power.
“The sulphurous swooned incontinence of time!”
Peter Taylor
I love “Lunchroom Lear,” written as a play that takes place in what I guess is the cafeteria of a seniors’ residence. It’s quite funny. Lear exhorts his cohort. He’s fuming about the worms in the salad, “and Jell-O strained through sieves of wanton care.” He laments, “The sulphurous swooned incontinence of time!” Sadly, at the end there is confusion and hell. Oh, well. Let’s have a laugh before we get there, eh?
Another poem I love is “I, Iphigenia,” as Taylor unexpectedly writes in the vernacular of a modern adolescent girl. It’s refreshing language: “and he doesn’t know where mom is / but I know where she is / the stupid bitch is flipping her clit around / she’s screwing one of the neighbours.”
Part II is entitled “Cities Within Us,” and is, in a way, the meat of the book. “Terceira I: Misericordia” describes people trying to repair a building after an earthquake. One line encapsulates what I like about Taylor, his realism: “perhaps fixing the mess will take forever.” The challenge is to be a fixer, not a wrecker.
In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Subway,” he gets fanciful again and strips language down to its essentials, noting only bare essentials like “7:30 am salmon run.” Verse VIII is the one poignant word, “Jumpers.”
“New York as an Element of Space & Time” revs the poet up; the city as street race. And in “Chicago Picasso” he’s overcome by the public art surrounded by massive institutions from the worlds of finance and religion. Hopefully, he finds a way to calm down, centre. But not yet. “Faustus & the City” gives us lines like, “Fertile and grotesque, / the city rises godward / from the pavement, stretching / its unimaginable fingers.” Culture has value but it comes at a cost. Cities are one place where it ferments. As do our personal experiences within our psyches.
In the next poem, “The Glass Flowers at Harvard,” Taylor undercuts the value of the created object. The glass flowers, exquisite though they may be, in their mimicking of the real, “mock nature’s cathedral.” Here we have an idea of the natural world as the true origin of beauty. I agree.
And then he veers again. In “City of Ideas,” the infinite mind in the finite body is “escaping / the skin’s excursion // into raw zones, suburbs / of a universal sanctuary.” […] “In that place, / I am no emissary but a citizen.” All hail the imagination, sometimes nightmare, sometimes ecstasy.
“Skunk plebiscite passes into law.”
Peter Taylor
Taylor made me smile in “Urban Renewal,” where the animals and plants are redoing the place, where “Terrorist squirrels / liquidate corporate assets as carpet- / bagging voles dig ersatz cities / under expropriated land” and “Skunk plebiscite passes into law.” […] “trees innocently tweeting / leaves.”
And you would think the above would be enough. But, no. Another whole section is called, rather intriguingly, “Birth Craquelure.” Its epigraph reads “And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget / falls drop by drop upon the heart.” Aeschylus, Agamemnon. Craquelure = a network of fine cracks in the paint or varnish of a painting. And the poems here are about family, that most personal, comfortable, sometimes hilarious, always inevitably dangerous and tragic place. His daughter, his siblings, his mother make painful appearances in their vulnerability. And Taylor is the witness. In “Cleaning Stones,” the last poem of this book, he and another tend to grave-stones, plant flowers. The poem’s last line: “I scrape clean layers of ancestral soil.”
Culture, nature. Imagination, ideas. Family, feelings. All the makings of great poems. All the cities (and flowers) come to dust. All of us, everywhere, together at last in earth.
