Unhaunting

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.