Mervyn Taylor, Gone Away

My Dear Mervyn,

It’s an experience at last coming to yr work: the seemingly effortless fusion of form, manner, craftpersonship & content of good sense, often wisdom. Very much the human condition and based, in yr case, so firm & lovingly in people (yr glitter of dedications) and in family. And you provide this sense of passing glory–and yet you capture well the GLORY (e.g ‘Masifé, Masifé. . .’). There’s orisha knowledge also. And I like that. So we have the person the thing the ancestor and the spirit. Of all our poets, you are the most of the diaspora, equally the empathy in New York and Trinidad. Poem after poem after poem left me breathless with admiration until it seemed that all that cd happen, is that each poem wd have to try to do ‘better’ than its predecessor. And towards the end, that began to worry me a bit–could you keep it up? And then you take it further still–& different–in the wonderfully extreme “Some Loves”:

          An emptiness in the belly,
          a burning near the heart:
          symptoms of the moon
          going down a dark valley
          showing hardly any light.
          Where does it hurt,
          the doctor asks, and lovesick,
          the sufferer points everywhere.

- Kamau Brathwaite