By Ronald Cummings, PhD
I brought you to see where we
started from, the undeniable beauty,
the eyes that still smile and remind you
this is who they were.
-Mervyn Taylor, “The Years”
The lines above appear in the final stanza of Mervyn Taylor’s poem “The Years.” We might read them as a statement of poetic purpose, a reflection on the possibility of poems to take us on journeys. Taylor’s phrase “where we / started from” is notably about the dynamics of time and place and both of these inform his poetic mappings as journeys (8). Taylor has also talked about his poems as shaped by a sense of “rediscovery.”1 Here the notion of “rediscovery” runs counter to that infamous tale of colonial “discovery” or what the writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter in her essay “1492: A New World View” has called the “first poetics of the Propter Nos” of 1492 that sought to define the Caribbean, to parcel territories and borders, and to govern the ways in which the region and its peoples might be named and known (20). According to Wynter, “that world-fateful day in October 1492” inaugurated “representation systems and categorical models” (49, 41) that have continued to structure terms of imagining and narration. In the poem “The Mountains Warned Us of Your Coming,” Taylor invokes “the rumbling, the new ships heard” as another way of referencing that violence of colonial military encounter (9). By contrast, Taylor’s “rediscovery” articulates the Caribbean in terms of multiplicity and an unfolding sense of astonishment and unknowing. He remains attuned to the surprise of the Caribbean as it might be revealed in the folds of different years2 or on a corner of Pacific Avenue in Brooklyn or “in the hills above the Bay Area” (67).3 Taylor (re)articulates the Caribbean as a question. He ends the poem “The Years” with the inviting query, “Would you / like to hear all their stories?” (8).
Taylor’s notion of “rediscovery” is both a philosophy of poetry and a rumination on the experience of reading and writing. In the blog “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery,” he asserts:
I believe the poem is an act of discovery, begun anew each time.
My aspiration is to present poems that are revelatory, that may bring
about a further understanding of the life we live.
Taylor’s poems then might be read in invitational terms and also as epistemologies of Caribbean re-encounter.4 Readers are asked to grapple and engage with the repeating and restructured materialities of Caribbean culture and experience as they are evidenced in the everyday. These are poems as vignettes in the long history of time. We see Taylor’s concern with time, history, and place in his titling of the sections of his most recent book The Last Train (Broadstone Books 2023). The first of the three sections of the volume, for instance, is titled “Where we began” while the last is titled “What became of us.” Speaking specifically about the poems that appear in this volume, Taylor has noted that:
The poems I’m writing now have a strong sense of home, of rediscovery. Having lived abroad for more than fifty years, with brief periods of return to Trinidad, I am finding surprises, like turning a corner to come into full view of the foothills that surround Belmont, looking up to see bright, yellow poui in full bloom. Or the surprising cries of children playing in the lane where I live, a sound strangely absent for years. Like my own childhood come back to visit. (Taylor, 2021)
Rather than engaging grand narratives of history, Taylor’s sense of place and time is filtered through an attention to everyday life, its cyclical shifts and returns. It is little wonder therefore that his work attends to how Caribbean people keep time: births, deaths, market, rainfall, floods, the rise and fall of tides, changes in address, migrations, music. These all become the substance of his poems. Taylor’s poetry constructs what I read as a Caribbean collective cultural commons or what he calls in the poem “The Last Island,” “a common place” (26)—a space in which we might all rediscover and reencounter each other as well as ourselves with a view to understanding and thinking together about “where we / started from” and moving towards “a further understanding of the life we live.”
In the discussion which follows, I reflect on Taylor’s most recent volume The Last Train as one text through which we might engage his poetic practice and think about his vision of the Caribbean. I turn to this volume because here we see a poet at the height of his creative talent reflecting on questions of life, art, mortality, and community. I also read this work in line with Myra Malkin who argues in a review of this book, which places it in the wider context of his writing, that: “The more I read him, the more I feel that his whole body of work is really … a single, richly variegated poem” (Malkin, 2023). I suggest that we might read this work in representative terms while also noting distinctions, revisions, and returns in relation to the rest of his oeuvre.5
Mervyn Taylor’s The Last Train is undoubtedly a book of remembering. In keeping with his attention to time, the author offers an indexing of the meaning of the term “last” in the elegiac poem, “My Father’s Last Night” and the book’s title poem, “The Last Train.” These poems mourn the death of the father. They also situate the poet-persona in relation to family, genealogy, and legacy. In the first of these poems, death and mourning are rendered in private terms through the powerful image of the presence of the “women, / my mother among them, [who] stood round, / stirring the night air, while his hands / on the bedspread waited to be still” (Taylor 6). In “The Last Train,” this death is traced in a more public sense through the referencing of the father’s work on the railway. Here the body of the departed is attended to in ways that resonate with “My Father’s Last Night,” but which also extend that portrait. While the father’s hands are a point of focus for the observer in “My Father’s Last Night” in “The Last Train,” it is the uniform of the father, “the blue of his jacket,” his “bright brass” uniform pin and his “cap still dark” that are meant to hold the reader’s attention (25). They become quotidian items weighted with a life’s significance.
The last train has gone into
the ether, looking for my father,
leaving a trail of smoke, the sky
the blue of his jacket but lighter (25).
We should not read this solely in terms of finality. Rather, in keeping with Taylor’s concern with cycles and Caribbean vernacular measures of time and movement, the title’s (the book and the poem’s) use of the term “last” comes to signal a previously departed train and or to refer to a prior journey. It becomes a marker of that which precedes the present. In this way, the phrase creates its own simultaneous sense of temporal order and opening. It invites us as readers to think about a before and after. We are left to contend with what it means for us to live in the wake of departed loved ones.
The poet meaningfully situates himself in the father’s legacy in “The Poem as Train.” That this poem, with its attention to questions of inheritance and succession, appears immediately before “The Last Train” unsettles a total sense of the finality of the departure, (though not the intensity of feeling) that is depicted. Taylor crafts a sense of tradition that resonates, for instance, with Robert Hayden’s well-known poem “Those Winter Sundays” in which the reader is ultimately left thinking about heritage, duty, and succession. In Taylor’s verse, the train as symbol, with its architecture of interlinked carriages, not only connects Taylor to his father, but also comes to hold a larger intergenerational history of labor, migration, movement, death, heritage, and inheritance.6
While a number of the poems in this volume reflect on death and on the father, the book notably begins with birth and with the figure of the mother. Taylor’s choreography of temporality is complexly balanced from the very beginning. In the opening poem, “Arjun’s Prediction,” the poet is prefigured as prophecy. And is also, at once, a figure out of time. The opening stanza muses on the idea “[t]hat a boy like you would be / born to a woman thinking / herself beyond conceiving” (3). The prophecy of the poet’s coming is presented at once as special and mundane within the flows of local community life. After the mother allows Arjun, the bearer of the prophecy, to “live / under our house for the rest // of his life,” they are left to wonder, “what else he would be right / about; // some revelation to be made / real, however long it took” (3). The singularity of this prophetic utterance is also linked with a sense of a Messianic figuring of the child through the stories of “Miss Ina across / the ravine” and Aunt Marie who “would bring that terror dog / Nazi to stand guard” (3). These wise women, summoned by the baby’s cries, come to visit “to see what allyuh doing the child? (3). The poet figure then is from birth ushered into a community not only concerned with his well-being but who become narrative relations.
We know that poets are well-known for conceiving their own mythologies. (We might think here of Derek Walcott’s Another Life or Kamau Brathwaite’s Sun Poem or Lorna Goodison’s I am Becoming My Mother, among others). Taylor’s poems, particularly those associated with childhood, are not simply nostalgic; they are carefully constructed temporal signposts of a journey. They conjure a considered yet intimate feeling of place and remembered lives and times. In some instances, they are historical reckonings, such as in “War Days” where childhood memories coalesce with a quotidian accounting of some the incongruities of war-time life in Trinidad.
Days of rations and shortages,
and the yellow ration card…
There were rumors of subs
in the sea all around, of enemies
embedded with us on this island
far from any bombing. It was not
our war. Still my aunt sang.
Buy a Flanders poppy, save it
for a souvenier. When they ask
who yuh buying it for, say
Trinidadian boys who died
In the war. And we remained
as quiet as blackout in Britain
no Carnival for years, only
the Rediffusion crackling (5).
This poem is but one example of the historical recalling that is a feature of Taylor’s work. The poem itself becomes a form of memorialization, much like the Flanders poppy and the aunt’s song that Taylor references in the poem. In lieu of physical monuments, commemorating the “Trinidadian boys who died / in the war,” these small things, a poppy, a song, a poem, become keepsakes of memory (Taylor 5). In his own memorializing practice, Taylor remains attuned to how family stories and songs can hold histories. He also offers glimpses of how local narratives and oral tellings can potentially recuperate and remember what might be rendered quiet in national and colonial narratives.
We can read Taylor’s The Last Train in relation to texts of poetic memoir in the Caribbean tradition such as some of those mentioned above (Walcott, Brathwaite, Goodison). However, Taylor’s practice of narrative rememory is also connected to the broader Caribbean memoir tradition. Consider how the lines above replay and recall episodes from Austin Clarke’s memoir of Barbadian childhood, Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack. In Clarke’s memoir, he writes of the impact of the second world war in Barbados:
At a certain time of night, we had to turn down our kerosene lamps. Black-outs reached us from up in the Mother Country from various “theatres of war.” The Germans, the British said, were now in Caribbean waters. We got scared. Sireens sounded throughout the night, throughout the country. Searchlights would point in the sky at nightfall; we would follow the line and imagine German planes in it. (Clarke 42)
Sandra Pouchet-Paquet has argued in her crucial study, Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation, that Caribbean autobiographical practice offers “a linked nationalist-internationalist discourse [which] articulates specific local and global attachments” (10). Some of these attachments are inter-island interlinkings and relations as seen in the connections and echoes between Taylor’s and Clarke’s narratives of war time in Trinidad and Barbados respectively. Other attachments stretch across different diasporic and global spaces. In “War Days,” the interconnections of Empire that link the Caribbean and Britain are underlined. In the poem “The Last Island,” the geographic closeness of Trinidad and Venezuela is referenced to bear witness to how “[t]oday, a refugee / might ride that current to find // a village, and join the singing” (26).
Elsewhere, Taylor usefully maps Caribbean connections to North American cultural, political, and artistic life and histories. “When We Were West Indian” offers brief poetic vignettes of how Caribbean culture and people have reshaped New York since the 1920s.
we’ve kept coming, bodies
wrapped in heavy wool,
riding the subways between
Harlem and Brooklyn…….
….We renamed Flatbush
J’ouvert City, declared it on the
signpost by Woodruff, where
Jerry the jeweler held court
on the history of the steelpan (64-65).
The poet also locates himself in this history and geography of Caribbean New York:
Not far from there, the poet
overlooking Prospect wrote
verses on post-its, afraid that
on a trip to the desk, he might
forget” (65).
Although he remains interested in offering us the narration of a life, Taylor is not focused on giving us a singular portrait of self. Instead, throughout his work, we encounter the writer-poet always situated in relation to a complex matrix of Caribbean life that is intergenerational and integral.
The book also records what we might understand as a community of the word. Throughout the collection, we see the poet in the company of other writers (including some mentors and friends now departed). “I wander into your poem” is how Taylor begins “Afield (with Derek W)” (15). We might read this poem as a dialogue with Derek Walcott’s verse and as a companion piece to “The Poem as Train.” However, if in “The Poem as Train,” the poet is represented as taking passengers on a journey, in “Afield (with Derek W),” the poet stops to “wonder how the poem can go / anywhere it wants in the world / without the poet” (15). Two poems, “Reading Outdoors” and “Reading in Bars,” might also usefully be read as companion poems. In each of these, the poet humorously reflects on the challenges of sharing one’s verse in unusual venues where disruptions and distractions abound. In “Reading in Bars,” we also see the poet in the company of Amiri Baraka, another poet he has identified as an influence:
Amiri waits his
turn, his back killing him, Newark
still a gleam in his eye. (23)
In the recollection of these moments, we come to understand this book as one concerned with poetry as practice, not just on the page but also shared interpersonally and communally.
Part two of the volume remembers and recalls the late Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill to whom the book is dedicated. McNeill (1941-1996) was known for his experimental verse and was a contemporary of Mervyn Taylor’s, emerging on the Caribbean literary scene alongside other poets like Mervyn Morris, Dennis Scott, and Wayne Brown (the last two listed now deceased). In Section 2 titled, “A Bus Called Blue Danube (Jamaica Suite),” we witness the poet as travelling and writing companion with McNeill. Taylor conjures a space where Tony, the poet and the man, might be invoked and remembered again. “Bluefields” evokes “Tony’s poem / about defecating on a neighbor’s porch” (42). The poem can be read in relation to Taylor’s epistolary note, “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016,” written on the occasion of McNeil’s birthday seven years ago, in which Taylor humorously reminiscences about McNeil’s advice on how one should deal with one’s enemies: “Shit on their porch,” you said, “as I believe you actually did one time”7 Taylor deliberately and disruptively refuses a past temporality, Tony’s poem, he suggests, “repeats its scatology in my ear” (42). In “Red Caps” we see Taylor writing a poem about McNeill writing a poem. The returns charted are temporal as well as spatial. The section offers what is in effect a travel itinerary with several poems named after places they travelled to together: Negril, Montego Bay, Hellshire, Linstead, Bluefields, Liguanea, Nine Miles, Goshen.
While Taylor is best known for his writing of the cultural geographies of Trinidad and Tobago and of New York, in which Brooklyn becomes rendered as a northern Caribbean metropolis, (these locations also appear in Parts one and three of this book), his attention to Jamaica in Part two, is offered with an intimacy, fondness, and an eye for small details that makes these poems rewarding to read. Taylor assumes the position of an observer who is not a native of the island but is also at the same time not a tourist. His relation to the place, much like his relation to Tony McNeill, is resolutely fraternal. Jamaica is observed with an astute curiosity and poetic generosity. This offers moments when he is able to leverage insightful critiques. We see this, for example, in the poem “Rundown” which offers keen reflections on the intimacies and complications of Jamaican class politics.
We also see in these poems about Jamaica, as well as elsewhere in this volume, a theory of the Caribbean as repeating islands (to borrow a term from the Cuban writer and theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo). In some instances, this sense of repetition is prompted through the observation of spatial and geographic details. Bluefields, for instance, sparks a note of recognition. Taylor writes, it “[r]eminds me of the town I come from / in Trinidad, lanes and little houses. (42). In other instances, this sense of repetition is prompted by a realization of the cycles through which we experience Caribbean time and history and the challenge that this offers for postcolonial narratives of progress. The poem “Liguanea” ends with the line, “Ruins of plantations loom again” (34).
The final poem of the book, “Three Chains,” is one that also invokes this sense of history. This time the repeating temporality of the islands is charted through the rise and receding of waves. The poet brings us “down to the water’s edge where/the foam retreats to become/ wave again” (89). “Three Chains” focuses on questions of property as a way of thinking about the complexities of Caribbean belonging and explores “Beachfront property” as another terrain in the long, ongoing story of Caribbean land conquest. The poet reminds us of a collective imperative and what is at stake in terms of people’s sense of place when he writes:
….We the people
can claim the island’s parameters.
sink our feet to the ankles in
sand dollar and shell, pretend we
own one of the yachts out there,
since like flotsam we arrived,
and like driftwood, we stayed. (89)
That the “water’s edge” should remain the terrain of “we the people” is a matter of the flow and tides of history (89). This politic of place is what is actively being claimed through the remembrances as poems and the poems as remembrances gifted to us in this work. This is a history from below, marked by a poetics of accumulation, by ocean water sediments, and time as tide. This is how we “see where we / started from” (8).
Notes
- See “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery” https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/.
See “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery” https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/. ↩︎ - See for example Taylor’s poems “The Years”, “The Year of Hungry”, “The Year of No Carnival”, and “The Year No One Died”, which can be read as a sequence of poems in the volume The Last Trian (2023). ↩︎
- See Taylor’s mappings of Caribbean space in North America in poems such as “Nostrand Avenue” and “Three from the Garment District” in Voices Carry (2017), the section titled “Overstayed” in The Waving Gallery (2014), and the poems “Brownstones” and “Train on a String” in Gone Away (2006). ↩︎
- My use of the phrase “epistemologies of Caribbean re-encounter” builds on the centrality of understanding to the poetics that Taylor outlines. ↩︎
- It is useful to note that a few poems are republished in this volume that previously appeared in Taylor’s first book An Island of His Own (1992). ↩︎
- I am interested in the narrative return to the figure of the Black Railroad worker in the current historical moment. We might think of a number of recent Black cultural texts that have taken up the railroad as a site of Black historical formation. We might consider, for instance, the Barbadian writer Cecil Foster’s book They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada (2019), Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter (2022), a winner of the 2022 Giller Award, or the television series The Porter (2022). ↩︎
- See Mervyn Taylor “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016” https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/mcneill.pdf ↩︎
Works Cited
Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Brathwaite, Kamau, Sun Poem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Clarke, Austin. Growing up Stupid Under the Union Jack: A Memoir. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2005.
Foster, Cecil. They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada. Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2019.
Goodison, Lorna. I Am Becoming My Mother. London: New Beacon, 1986.
Hayden, Robert. A Ballad of Remembrance. Paul Breman: London, 1962
Malkin, Myra. “Review of The Last Train by Mervyn Taylor.” Tinderbox Poetry Journal, vol. 8, no.1, March 2023. Retrieved from https://tinderboxpoetry.com/review-of-the-last-train-by-mervyn-taylor
Mayr, Suzette. The Sleeping Car Porter. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2022.
Pouchet-Paquet, Sandra. Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
Taylor, Mervyn. The Last Train. Frankfort, Kentucky: Broadstone, 2023.
—. “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery,” April 9, 2021. Retrieved from https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/
—. Voices Carry. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2017.
—. “Derek Walcott, Man of Faith.” Retrieved from https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/derek-walcott.pdf
—. “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016.” Retrieved from https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/mcneill.pdf
—. The Waving Gallery. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014.
—. Gone Away, New York: Junction Press, 2006.
Walcott, Another Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.
Wynter, Sylvia. “1492: A New World View”. In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995, pp. 5–57.
Read more in this issue: Interview | Writing Prompt | Poems
Ronald Cummings is an associate Professor of Caribbean Literature and Black Diaspora Studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His work focuses on questions of gender and sexuality and Black cultural resistance. His work has been published in various journals and he is the editor of four critical volumes including Caribbean Literatures in Transition 1970-2020, co-edited with Alison Donnell (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Harriet’s Legacies: Race, Historical memory and Futures in Canada, co-edited with Natalee Caple (McGill Queens University Press, 2022). Harriet’s Legacies was the winner of Canadian Studies Network Book Award for Best edited collection (2023). Cummings is also the editor of Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2021). He is an affiliated member of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg.