Salt Modern Poets

2 total works

The Unhaunting

by Andrew Taylor

Published 25 July 2009

The unhaunting is Taylor’s first collection of poems since his Collected poems was published by Salt in 2004, and ranges widely, in geography, mood, thematic preoccupations and style. The book’s title is also that of a poem concerned with how places can be haunted by people even while alive, and whose death provides a kind of exorcism and psychological healing. The poet’s own experience of severe illness from cancer in 2003 enables him to see death not as something to be feared and abhorred, but as an opportunity for reconciliation and love. However most of this book is much lighter in tone, reflecting the poet’s own sensitivity to the infinite variety of experience. A visit to Falmouth, time teaching in Shanghai, the funeral of his wife’s mother in Germany, cooling one’s heels in Paris, a visit to pristine forest in the south of Western Australia, all find a place here. Also clearly evident is a concern for the health of the environment, and a deep love of Australian nature and Australia’s land- and riverscape. The poet’s love of music is not only reflected in a sequence explicitly about it, but also in his play with rhythms and sound echoes, and in the use frequently made of them to structure poems and sequences, almost – but not quite – in defiance of meaning. The language is lucid but tantalising, fully aware of current experiment but not surrendering its own distinctiveness of it. The book also contains a number of translations of poems by the Italian Nobel Laureate, Eugenio Montale, for whose poetry Taylor feels a distinct affinity.

Collected Poems

by Andrew Taylor

Published 15 March 2004

This book collects all the poems published by Andrew Taylor since his first book appeared in 1971, together with a substantial section of new work, and confirms him as one of Australia's most original and individual poets. The poems range through explorations of personal and family relationships, encounters with a wide variety of landscapes and cultures, and social and political issues. A strong sense of mortality is balanced by a delight in the details of the physical world, a fascination with everyday objects, and a belief in the regenerative power of love. Poems for children and aging or dying parents explore the hopes and possibilities of the future for the young, and the significance of a lived life for the old and those who survive them. This poetry is firmly located in the physical world, often in specific landscapes and places, ranging from the coastlines of southern and western Australia to numerous places in Europe and the USA where the poet has lived. Although many of the poems are short and meditative-lyrical, there are also several extended sequences, including one of book length written during the absence abroad of the poet's wife.
Other sequences explore this relationship within a variety of geographical and historical contexts, and the importance of the beach, the coast and significance of living on an island-continent for the poet's youth and middle age. Both the physicality and the ephemerality of the physical world are given meaning and illumination by the lives lived within it, in a language that is lively and confident, yet also aware of how the richness of the world inevitably evades its grasp.