Body of the World (Ausable Press, 2005)

Reviewed by Sarah Maclay

      "There are many things I know are part of me / that I've never seen . . ." begins Sam Taylor, in "For Love," " . . . But they're not all pretty."   In fact, some of them are harrowing; some, in other hands, we would call tawdry, but inclusion is part of the point; others, simply quotidian--Wal-Mart, McDonalds and Jiffy Lube all make appearances here; so does pi, so does God (as a hypothetical habitue or employee of the above establishments, as well as in the guise of an apparently homeless man), so does Judas--in dramatic monologue. Still other things are simply gorgeous. Since "No one speaks the words I need to know," Taylor gives us, better than "The name of the tree near the Ventura mission," the way it " . . . lopes and lurches like a drunken dragon / when the wind blows, exposing a sinewed belly / of branches." He gives us "The boys, knee-deep in indigo / / and almond twilight, dragging in their nets." He also gives us, in "Anonymous," the way "The woman who had been reading there / had to pee, a warm trickle /and thought of the credit card bill / she had to pay and how she needed sandals," and the way the climactic sequence of "Accident" begins to come on when a crash survivor goes back to the scene, finding in the remaining traces of his now-dead girlfriend " . . . A letter / he had written her last summer, half rain-bled. The truck / towed and gone, he found her spilled menstrual pads / still caught in the sumac, left them, sobbing."

      What is convincing about his vision is the way he takes in everything, reporting his awareness to us with absolute trust and candor. We're thrust into a world of wide-sightedness where we have to remember how often we self-censor even the most routine from a shared awareness, yet how, so often, it's in these moments of privacy, behind the scenes (therefore, as the Latin would have it, "obscene"), that the world shifts inside us. For Taylor, every part of, every function of the body is equally holy--and equally ordinary--therefore equally and seamlessly reportable as a part of the human (not just his) experience.   His commitment, if we take "Brief, Accidental Orchestras" as part ars poetica , is to "speak only on the condition of anonymity, only by the promise that my name will be erased. Then you will understand that I spoke the truth." Or, as the speaker says in "Human Geography," "It's time we stopped all the lies." The poems live continually within the recognition "that we have arrived in an imperfect world / in which everyone, even those we most love, / is speckled with some gross failing   . . . / that requires we strive to understand / something about their life in order to   / forgive them." He shies away from nothing that he sees. Like Blake and Yeats, Taylor is driven by a visionary yoking of opposites, as well as a predilection for seeing the vast in the tiny, the specific. But the diction here is thoroughly current, all-embracing, and bracing.   Image and music are equaled by sheer nerve--and also by an almost palpable, sensate compassion. Narrative sneaks up on us as we're thrust into the midst of imagery that begins to take shape as story, only after an artful delay--for instance, we're nineteen lines into "Matinee" before, as we try to make out the patterns of red and black "on a movie screen," ("a red field, brimming / with hives of black-rimmed blisters, charred / craters, crisped void.   I thought of a country / burning, bombed . . ."), the images resolve as "magnified slides" of his mother's "blood."      

     What this adds up to: an almost impossible, vertiginous beauty, a conviction of inextricable connection between all things and beings--and, by whatever name (preferably none), their inherent divinity--so deep that even when this is not stated, it informs Body of the World , poem to poem--with a vision of the world as a place in which "This one bolt shall be / the entire metropolis, the rattling metal of ten thousand feet . . ." and so it's quite possible, necessary even, to leap from bolt to bolt with the assurance that each is unavoidably linked in a way that at once defies convention and proves its own logic until ". . . sometimes it suddenly happens, / in some man or woman, the darkness / crystallizes, turns from the inside out / into light, a silent vociferous radiance . . ."