Gone Away
by Mervyn Taylor

The latest [2006] collection from Mervyn Taylor offers up his familiar blend of the ancestral and the immediate, the natural and the psychological, the phenomenological and the social. "Where does it hurt, / the doctor asks, and lovesick, / the sufferer points everywhere." "Poem after poem after poem left me breathless with admiration until it seemed that all that could happen, is that each poem would have to try to do ’better’ than its predecessor. And towards the end, that began to worry me a bit… And then it [is taken] further still" Kamau Brathwaite."