New Titles in Poetry

If the World Becomes So Bright: Poems
Author: Keith Taylor
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Paper $15.95 (95 p.)
ISBN-13: 9780814333914
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I have to be reminded, at this time of year, why I live in a cold climate. Here near Contoocook, N.H, weeds are awake but lilacs are dreaming and warm days shy away. So I am drawn to the work of a poet who knows the cold. Perhaps only a long-time dweller in northern latitudes can warm to the winter-a poet in Michigan, for example-and manage to live with the way that season can turn ugly, as it does in the poem, "The Day After the Ice Storm." The night of ice that kills a young woman and the dazzling day that follows are the poles between which Keith Taylor has strung the poems of If the World Becomes So Bright. Though the seasons and the features of the natural world are studied by a sensibility that makes the most of the moment, (read the brilliant "Two Days") the poems in the collection are about interior space, and the long view of time. Take the opening section of the work, "Conditions", in which each poem begins with "If…". Expressed in an open-line form that makes them visually accessible, these short meditations built on memory and close observation lead us to contrast deep bonds connecting us to friends and family with the quicksilver quality of our lives. Taylor uses the opportunity of the conditional to test his response to the inevitability of death and loss. His answer is resistance, and his resistance is based in art, which is based in turn upon what he describes later in "What's Needed Now" as "…this attention to small worldly things...". This set-up at the beginning of the book fuels the intensity of the problem dominating the middle section, identified by the poet as a lack of his ability to focus. In "Faith at the Edge of Winter", the dilemma is overcome by what the reader believes is the only possible response: observation both minimal and essential, with a single element carrying the weight of a season or a turn of mind in each of the 36 numbered sections. Following this winter turn, the reader gathers armloads of blooms in the remaining poems, which are a refreshment to the senses and the soul.