In The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011) Rob Taylor looks at the material of everyday life—scrubbing a pot, a wet cat shaking in the house, lying in bed awake, remembering learning to shave, doing the ironing—and fishes beneath that material for take-aways. The book, heading into its second printing, would seem to have some traction. Taylor’s poems enact an effort to stay alert to the strangeness of life. “To be Familiar Enough to Name is Halfway to Death,” for instance, travels from foreign streets to an unfamiliar feeling home, (“a place I hardly remember / though I study / its television”) to the inability of deciding a child’s name before seeing his or her face.
Early on, a ghazal “You Can’t Lead a Horse” has as its radif, water, except in the couplet “The woman is drunk. /She asks the water for waiter.” which made me laugh aloud; how fitting that a inverted stumble should be embedded into the form.
The poems are more narrative than the cento of his at The Incongruous Quarterly in 2010 (where several lines are taken from female writers). The poems in The Other Side of Ourselves acknowledge the parallel universe of genders. For example, in “Creation Stories” “she has her narratives, he has his, / and together they move through the world. // Their scripts are filled with the same set pieces, same characters, / yet they are blocked differently, recite different lines.”
Admittedly, part of what Taylor alludes to is not gender-specific, but has to do with the isolation of each person’s perception. In this case they happen to be different genders, feeling the simultaneous connection and solitude that is universal to all humans. In the poem it goes as they ponder, “Our child will live on an island between us, she concedes [….] And us, We will live an ocean apart?”
The poems are a thinking through, a noodling along. “The Way He Smiled Then” touches the surreal, or perhaps breaks the fourth wall our own memory can be—just how was it the story went? It’s not one mulling tone of poems. For example in “Nothing Against Art” (p. 18) we start in with “Nothing against Art Garfunkel / but I’d sucker punch the guy / if I’d ever get the chance.”
Some poems are closer to prose, but given that one poem is a tribute to Al Purdy, another a response to his. The sensibility is more common man than clever concise capering. It fits the content. It’s a special pleasure to see haiku incorporated into “regular poetry”,
Taylor pays tribute to daily experience, as in a poem to his father called “Lyric” (p. 55-58): “Your arthritic joints / supple as you supported my body / at swimming lessons, cradled its exhausted / looseness to bed each night”. It catches elusive truths, such as the challenge of what to remember of a father 14 years after his death, the “slow burial / under new memories” (p. 56).
They are poems in an unhasty dialogue with death, getting by while probing for emblematic things, such as the black that accumulates in layers on a pan. Or for completion of journeys, even those of fellow writers, like “I have gone to Keta, daytrip” (p. 50-51). It is a response to Ghanian poet Kobena Eyi Acquah half a century later. There are vignettes from the coastal town, comic flashes such as where a “a miserably / sober man apologizes for all the drunks” and a flood causes a fisherman to cast his nets in what was once his neighbour’s living room, the water under his feet “a flash of the miraculous that surfaces / in the mind at times then disappears below.”
In places the collection seems sore-hearted, while in others there’s a counterbalance of comedy that lightens without undercutting the poems’ central meaning. It doesn’t come across as maudlin and steers away from the rocky coast of schmaltz but touches down at port of touching here and there. There are nuggets of phrases that sing. Overall, the collection holds together well with looped themes. Well worth reading and re-reading.
