Voices Carry

<p>Strands of Trinidad Mervyn Taylor’s birthplace are woven throughout this beautiful collection of poems that turn to memory and desire an unsentimental <em>saudade</em> that contains what has been lost and his love for it: a Port of Spain where “what fell was dew not ashes” a Savannah where horses once raced. Now his capital city lies “like a wounded man”. In Brooklyn on Fulton murals are fading and on Nostrand dancehalls have closed as in the larger world the earth explodes “country by country”. Voices <em>do</em> carry in <em>Voices Carry</em> the sixth book from this master of what is left unsaid<em>.</em> With exquisite unembellished detail Taylor renders visible and audible the drama at the heart of town the tempo of calypso the dialogue of neighbors in Brooklyn and most importantly Belmont where the poet grew up and realized that a writer is what he wanted to be all those voices letting us know that this is what he most thoroughly is.</p><p>—Susana H. Case author of <em>4 Rms w Vu</em>.</p><p>The Master Portrait Painter Mervyn Taylor is visiting his old haunts the island he has sketched time and again with indelible ink the Brooklyn of his residence in exile and the journey back and forth the poet returning to fill up his paint bottles to recount the stories of voices that carry from dreams memories the Port of Spain that has changed forever and yet remains the city that is his own.</p><p>In this new collection that is at the same time as old as the eternal truths he tells we celebrate the voices the poet hears: we see him walk beside the Savannah people calling out hello Uncle Daddy; we lament the turning of green places into dangerous fields and we cry quietly while accompanying “the boy walking with his broken kite/to find the old Indian who bought him/the thread to tell him how well it flew.”</p><p>—Indran Amirthanayagam author of <em>An</em> <em>Uncivil War</em>.</p>