No End In Strangeness, New and Selected Poems - Bruce Taylor (Cormorant Books)

Today's book of poetry:
No End In Strangeness, New and Selected Poems.  Bruce Taylor.  Cormorant Books Inc., Toronto, Ontario.  2011

You read some books of poetry and you still have little sense of who the poet is.  This does not happen in Bruce Taylor world.

Taylor gives us an encyclopedic open book to his world and how he sees it.

No End In Strangeness is not strange at all.  Taylor mines a very rich seam of the on-going conversation he is having with the world.

The Waterfall

Here the river, in a rage

of fury and self-hate,

annihilates itself.

It tears itself to pieces like a page,

and leaps from its own rocks,

a thousand times a day.

Then, in the smash and mist,

it shudders up again

to hang there like a fist,

shivering with self-disgust,

impatient to be done

and failing, as it must.

It roars like something in a cage,

scraping the walls with its nails.

Even as I lie not-sleeping

in my tent, it pounds and chafes,

milling itself to a fine rain.

Yet in the morning it is there again,

tall as a pinetree

but weaker than pipesmoke,

and always producing that roar,

a sound like everyone alive

talking at once.

I have come a long way

to watch this water fail.

I have paddled down rapids,

through keepers and sweepers

and carried my boat on my head.

I have punched through waves,

walked around logjams

and peeled out from the oil-black calm

into the rushing hydraulics

of the main channel

where the dark water flexes

and slides right under itself.

I came without capsizing once

to the place where the river

spends what it has in one throw,

and my plan is to stay for a while

with a plume of hysteria

rising inside me, as spray

cools my cheeks and my shirt

becomes drenched and just stare

at this collapse that lasts all day,

this demolition dangling in the air

as if caught in a tape loop.

And I can't tell if those are

fluted columns of long white hair

or whether this thing is strong

or effete, steadfast

or fleet. It slides

but abides, sways

but stays. One moment it is trembling

like an Edwardian maiden in her filmy dress,

pressing the back of her hand to her head,

and the next it's as stable as marble,

older than letters,

stiff as the bone in my arm

and standing before it

with shame and self-love

plunging and recirculating

inside me, I can't seem to tell

if this is a wise thing

or a foolish one, a teacher

or an idiot child,

a beginning or an end.

...

It's hard to tell you how gentle I found these poems.  When I tell you there is a gentle nature to Taylor's vast gaze I want you, the reader, to know it is a high compliment.

It's always easy to crack the whip, but a little wisdom and experience, a well placed word, will always get the job done better.

William Wordsworth, Dwight D. Eisenhower, St. Thomas Aquinas, Theodore Roethke and Samuel Taylor Coleridge all stop in to chat over the course of No End In Strangeness.  There are also orangutans and fireworks.

Checks in the Horn Timer,

and a Hogged Sheer

What the would-be

boat-restorer bought

for half the value of its wood,

was an unused future,

which had stood

for five years

in a quiet spot

behind the builder's widow's

house;

           and what he got,

apart from a pretty good trailer,

was a new supply

of fresh, unsampled days,

and also the builder's

hope that, by and by,

he would be loading up

the thing he'd made

and sailing it away

to where the sky

is interleaved with orange

like a mixed drink,

and happiness arrives in waves

of salt and fronds

and green volcanoes wafting

in a horizontal haze.

That's what the builder thought.

But where he ended up with

was a brownish spot

that never went away,

and there is his Fiji,

flush with rot

in the long grass,

seedy with dreams,

the sun's heat slowly

opening her seams.

Meanwhile, the buyer

has a nautical

vocabulary to acquire,

a trampled field

to learn it in,

a patch of well-packed dust

on which to pour his liquid hours,

and make is own damned

ocean, if he must.

...

Taylor is a steamroller poet.  Steady and certain.  All of these poems take place within some fairly formal constraints Taylor insists upon.  As a result this collection reads with a remarkably consistent tone, Taylor keeps the temperature constant.

Shadowed

A cougar will attack from behind,

I'm told, and it will feel

like somebody cracking a two-by-four

over the back your neck.

Later, you may show the reporters twenty-nine

neat metal staples down your spine,

and what you will say is: I guess it just wasn't

my time.

And later still, in the deep night,

you will be alone with the uncontrollable

shaking, but that isn't you being afraid

of a lion, it is only your body,

that great confused baby,

attempting to figure things out,

too simple to know

that the past

has passed.

Anyway, it is something to think about

as I walk too quickly

up this gravel road, alone.

Except, it is regret

that is stalking me

with quiet steps,

while the past keeps pace

in the steep bluffs and dark foliage

on either side.

...

Bruce Taylor's No End In Strangeness reminds me of the great Raymond Souster.  Both eloquently simple and covering grand ground.  It's not that Taylor sounds like Souster, it is more the feeling the poetry inspires.  You always feel like you are part of an intelligent conversation with the world.

These are stories of the true human heart and who doesn't want to read those?  These are poems about that journey to understanding and happiness, love and loss, all that universal stuff that makes us so bleeding human.

Bruce Taylor

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bruce Taylor is a two-time winner of the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry. He has published three books of poetry: Getting On with the Era (1987), Cold Rubber Feet (1989), and Facts (1998). He has been a teacher, a puppeteer, and a freelance journalist. He lives in Wakefield, Quebec.

Bruce Taylor reading his poem "Life Science

For the Biblio File"

www.cormorantbooks.com

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