The Goat
Mervyn Taylor
96 pages perfectbound
$11.00
ISBN 1-881523-10-1
Taylor’s New York poems comprise a roughly virtuosic series of contemporary vignettes laced with apocalypse; they are attuned
to the pain in all desire and the beauty in decay—not unlike Lorca’s explorations of the city. Beginning ‘one of those nights/when
the intersection is crazy/with cars,’ and moving swiftly through casual, but angst-tinged observation—Taylor’s second collection
portrays people on the economic and social fringes, from the ‘Old Soldier in the Park’ (‘his white hair flying/against the green,/a
bird out of formation’) to the pathetic story of ‘Sleepy,’ about a mother who spots her son’s face on a wanted poster. Finding no
easy answers, yet never letting his lyrical and painterly gifts fly off into irrelevance, Taylor remains true to his desire to get his world
on paper, a world of New York and beyond that continues to be inflected by his Trinidadian roots‘He feels for a taste/of his own
flesh, he can smell it all the time,/cooking in the curry of a human dream.’
- Publisher's Weekly
Taylor is a wary technician, even a cunning one. He works in taut meters that want to cohere the pressures of the casual. Mervyn
Taylor is an honest poet, and that is high and sufficient praise indeed.
- Derek Walcott