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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