NIGHT WHEN MOON FOLLOWS
by Cheryl Boyce Taylor
84 Pages, Long Shot Productions, Inc, $12.00
i've tried for years to dodge the moon
finally i've given up
now i know now i know
everywhere i go everywhere i go
moon follows
from "Night When Moon Follows"
Like the woman in the poem "She Has Three Heads" which appears in
NIGHT WHEN MOON FOLLOWS, Cheryl Boyce Taylor's latest collection of
poetry, the book itself has three heads or voices: a bright, lyrical
one that speaks from the author's past; a dark, serious one that speaks
from her present, and one that glows with hope for the future.
That first voice belongs to the first section of her book, titled
"Night". It is wistful and nostalgic for the people, places and
events of her native Trinidad in poems such as "Night", "Poem for Linsey
Ashley" and "Grandmother".
The message of this section is that while she, like Derek Walcott
and other writers, may have left the land of her birth it has not left
her.
The poet can still command the colorful Trinidadian dialect, as
in the following selection from "Miss Trinidad":
miss trinidad
gurl yu workin up en meh hips
ah lyin down en de blue
blue water by de cocount tree
madame yu watchin meh
first first time ah seein yu agin
We feel almost as though we are there; she makes us know her
pride in and reverance for the place and the beat that birthed her,
we are reminded that the United States is a nation of immigrants.
The middle passage, "When" speaks with the dark voice.
"Sugar", "Bruise" "Prick" and "Night When Moon Follows" radiate
stark dread and pain--here she tells us what it is like to live
as a diabetic, here flowers and trees give way to needles and bruises
and pain. As Andrea R. Lockett, the editor of the book, stated in
her Introduction, it "grounds us in the hard, frustrating challenges
of the diabetic's daily life." In "Cry" Boyce Taylor writes
i've come late to a true
understanding of my sinister condition
We too come to a true understanding our own inevitable and
inescapable mortality. This is grim, foreboding ground,
as awful as a the descriptions of the trenches in Siegfried Sassoon's
work, and all the more grim: this battle field is the poet's body.
But NIGHT WHEN MOON FOLLOWS is not a graveyard; these poems are not
epitaphs and elegies.
The last poem in the section, "Water", (which was commissioned
by Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival where it was choregraphed by Ronald
K. Brown and performed by his Evidence Dance company at New York's
Joyce Theater in 1999) is a song almost defiantly sung in the key
of life:
death must wait
i have three lives and water to rock me
and i'll dance a blue river
dance a blue river
calling the names of our sons
"Moon Follows" the final section, possesses bubbling voice of a
spring, gushing with this lifegiving water. "San Francisco Morning",
"Butterflies", "Tulips", "Life" and others are nature songs, pastorals,
still lifes with North American settings. The poet takes us by the
hand and leads us around a New England and California filled with
sunlight, fresh air and flowers, through forests of redwoods and
sequoias, and, in a beautiful haunting passage from "A Tray of Sleeping
Begonias", she whispers an intimate discovery; she has found
a cure here: she is in love
oh sister
our blood has sustained us
in these ravaged years
your head a tray of red sleeping begonias
upon my breast
The poems of NIGHT WHEN MOON FOLLOWS are little masterpieces of
what Robert Frost called "compression". They are short, tight, balanced
and controlled yet bursting with wild fresh raw energy and soul. They
run the emotional gamut from the grave solemn and mournful to the
giddy and joyful.
The book is the skillful work of a mature poet, sure of her
craft, rendering her subjects in short able lines and concise
stanzas. Her diction is fresh and unique, her language plain, yet
her imagery is exotic and colorful. Her tone is unerringly proper
for the subject or occasion.
She has improved since her last volume (RAW AIR 1997). Further,
this is more than a mere collection; it has been concieved and executed
as though it were a whole. While it is divided into three sections, it
is connected like a triptych.
If diabetes is , as Ms. Lockett states, "a metaphor for much of
what ails our society", NIGHT prescribes a cure; recognition of and
pride in roots and ancestry, acceptance of reality, love for love, life
and nature.
Cheryl Boyce Taylor has conjured up a vision: it is nightime, it
is still dark. But there sits the Moon in the sky. She is full, she is
shining, she is reflecting the light of her daytime sister, the Sun.
She is a harvest moon. She is a calypso moon. She is singing that day
is not far away. And she is opening us to wisdom, courage and under-
standing, like the flower in Robert Hayden's poem, "The Night-Blooming
Cereus".
Cheryl Boyce Taylor's is a voice that will never " go gentle into
that good night".
Chris Hayden
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