Curios: Poems

By Judith Taylor

Book Overview

In Curios, her first collection of poetry, Judith Taylor emerges as the speediest meditative poet since Emily Dickinson. Her poems set off for all the worthy old ontological destinations, but what new routes they discover Taylor can cover more ground in eight lines than most poets manage in eighty. But her rapid transit is accomplished without loss of density or emotional resonance.

Taylor's love of literary tales is deeply embedded in-and extended by-her poems. References to Wilde, Rilke, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Charlotte Bront , and Lady Murasaki are rife, as are characters from fairy tales and children's stories. Even familial figures take on archetypal roles, lending the speaker's personal memory a mythic significance. The most pronounced motifs in Curios suggest a world enriched by fantasy: ghosts, fans, screens, masks, silk, windows, dreams, and curtains. But Taylor makes apparent that her imagination has bloomed not only to augment but to accommodate the world's multifariousness: I wanted everything connected to everything in a logical universe. / . . . In time, the world begins to shape your stubborn mind. ("She's Got Mail")

This debut collection is remarkable not only for its consistent style but also because it showcases a new form of poem-her own invention-a "curio" in itself. In extended lines, usually seven to eight, Taylor delivers deadpan statements and poses questions that are startlingly provocative-more like koans than interrogatives. Her poems range widely and wildly, at times taking surrealistic turns, yet they always maintain contact with the earth. It is a bonus to the reader that Taylor's grounding wire is humor. Even as the poems astonish by their swiftness, daring, and the accuracy of their surprising connections, they make us laugh: Do the stars hiss when they slash across the sky, cooling down? / Get a grip on yourself, said Mother often. ("Excess")

The volume's title, Curios, is remarkably apt. With unexpected images and questions reminiscent of childhood, Taylor riddles the surface of perception. These poems prove that curiosity-and imagination-will get the best of us. This title received a grant from the Greenwall Fund of The Academy of Ameri

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1889330450
• ISBN13: 9781889330457
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Dazzling

Judith Taylor's poems are funny, scary, and startling both because of the emotion they reveal and the language they are woven from. The women of Curios transcend limitation even when they still think they're surrounded by it, and in showing this Taylor allows her readers to transcend limitation too.

Read this book!

Taylor's work is a canny combination of candor and deceptions, illusions, allusions and assertions deftly rendered into short poems that take up much more space in the world than one might think from looking at them. For the most part, she effaces narrative: "I believe in plot, my dear, only when it suits me." She provides both the words and the gaps. Lacunae are not seconds for the reader to breathe, but absences that become part of each poem's strange logic. She devises and assembles details that immediately become the crux, liminal fringe that becomes the essence of a situation. You'll hear echoes of Louise Bogan and James Tate, of humor and bewilderment, weariness, acceptance and defiance. There is beauty in both the vehicle and subject of these poems. In the absence of ligature is a study of loss and desire. As you read, the lines that you will start to memorize add up: "I can't stop computing the long division of my sadness" and "In time, the world begins to shape your stubbourn mind." The pleasures and provocations of this poetry are bountiful.

Curios is a true breakthrough work

Believe the blurbs and promo copy on this book. Judith Taylor has pulled off a marvelously original collection of poems that are simultaneously eerie, witty, and profound. And she succeeds in spite of following none of the usual poetry workshop precepts: there's no sense of place, no meter, none of the usual topics. Each poem is written in seven or eight lines, each end-stopped, and the effect is dramatic. Thank you Sarabande Books for defying convention and publishing this work.