Rob Taylor
[Author Name]
Biography
Rob Taylor is the author of four poetry collections, including Strangers (Biblioasis, 2021) and The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He is also the editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood Editions, 2018) and Best Canadian Poetry 2019 (Biblioasis, 2019). His interviews with over one hundred Canadian poets have been published in The Walrus, ARC, EVENT, PRISM international, Canadian Notes & Queries, CV2 and The Puritan, among other venues. He lives in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territories of the Kwikwetlem, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-waututh peoples, where he teaches Creative Writing at Simon Fraser University.
Poetics Statement
“Acute moments of disorientation are when we need a companion, not a treatise. Someone who does not simply tell us about something, but sits beside us in the silence that follows— breathing, alive. This is what... early, beloved poems did for me. Following my father’s death, in the disorientation of my teenage years, poems became my companions. The rhythms and associative movements of the poets’ bodies and subconscious minds, captured on the page, reached out and met mine: in how I read the poems, how I spoke them, how I sewed together the metaphorical leaps the poems made with the thread of my own life, until I found myself shaking hands with that poet, or embracing them, or even merging into one shared body, one set of lungs, one voice…
In the last few years we’ve experienced the heaping of one dislocation upon another—the pandemic, the deepening political divide, environmental collapse, war. All of us have felt, at times, alone or abandoned, even when surrounded by people. I hope that poetry, and poetic language, have been a companion for you during this time. I hope poetry has helped you feel more present in your daily life, and less isolated. I hope—though I doubt your conscious mind would frame it this way—that when you’ve read you’ve felt the somatic ghost presence of another body rising up from the page to greet your own.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Strangers
At three, on vacation, my mother and I alone
on an aerial tour (two seats, no exceptions),
my father waving until he was very small
then unfolding the paper from under his armpit,
I wept with the depth of the assured—
the Ruahine Range irrelevant below.
My mother asked, coddled, pleaded.
The pilot offered ridiculous faces,
an early return. Only in the sight
of my father, rising from a bench beside
the helipad, hand raised again in greeting,
was my world, pulled apart, reassembled.
Nine years later his hand, warm,
was thirty minutes later cold. I watched
him wheeled away. I held his ashes
and wondered where to put them.
And I waited for his return.
I wait still, whatever sense it makes.
Alright, okay, we do not live forever. Our works
are lost and are not found. There is no consolation.
But, Elise, I read your poems today.
Each rose and greeted me as if everything
was normal, as if my return had been expected.
And in this act I saw my father.
It makes no sense. You would be strangers
if not for this. But I saw him, Elise.
He was your poems.
He was waving and becoming larger.
Five Weeks
– With lines from Elizabeth Smart
Anonymous. A lima bean, they say.
No eyes or brain beneath
the flesh and blood and membrane
of my wife. But O my burning baby
anchors love within me. One day
you’ll wonder if any of this matters,
if you and it share a common bond,
if Love’s a word we pin to things
thin-skinned enough to pierce.
I sit in bed beside you both—
you and the idea of what you’ll be—
and listen as your mother breathes
for three. If we lose you what of you
will linger? If you last how will this
breathing, burning love divide,
sustain, and multiply? When I speak of it,
many years from now, to whom will
I be speaking? My dear, my darling,
do you hear me where you sleep?