The heart of Richard Allen Taylor’s new collection, Letters to Karen Carpenter (Main Street Rag, 2023), is “Undeliverable,” the first of its four sections. There Taylor apostrophizes the late singer of poignant hits and anthems of romantic promise like “Close to You” and “It’s Only Just Begun,” as he struggles directly with his book’s core premise and challenge. The intimate beauty of Carpenter’s voice, combined with the pathos of her early death due to complications of anorexia nervosa, often served Taylor and his late wife, Julie, as a compelling soundtrack to their life together, especially during her last days when she was dying of leukemia.
In “Recruiting You, Karen, as a Pen Pal,” Taylor acknowledges his own mother’s quiet disappointment in him for rebuking his daughter’s impulse to address her dead grandfather during a Thanksgiving prayer. Thus, Taylor both confesses and disavows his paternal inclination to lay down the law about communication with the dead. Such religious inhibitions give way to imaginative play audible in this poem’s title and its transformation of “a brass lamp” into a magic lamp that delivers his late mother’s “unsolicited advice.” Moreover, that maternal heirloom, duly capitalized in the next poem, names the record company that released the Carpenters’ first single, Magic Lamp.
You’ll recall that, before there was writing, Orpheus sang as he descended to rescue Eurydice from the land of the dead. Those who turn the feelings such a story relates into compelling songs or poems can deeply affect us. We understand what they are saying, or we know that, someday soon enough, grief will teach or remind us, and we will understand again. In Letters Taylor achieves such effects in representing the process of grief and mourning. His serious yet playful approach enables him to bear the weight of such heavy loads both honestly and nimbly. The epistolary form opens a space for tones of confidentiality and intimate exchange. It puts Taylor in conversation with addressees who are out of reach but familiar and loved. Of course, there are darker sides to such imaginary conversations, and Taylor does not pretend otherwise. In a down-to-earth way, he expands our horizons, so they include mercy and gratitude along with suffering and loss. You can hear it in “Note to Karen about Mortality,” the opening poem of Letters:
I watch a lone hawk ride thermals, rise
without effort—and think of mortality’s leaden
weight, sloughed off like last year’s molting.
Not that I believe in reincarnation. Not that I
disbelieve. I mean the hawk reminds me
of you, and my wife—who loved your music.
“Undeliverable,” the book’s second section, represents raw encounters with the Grim Reaper in “Chemotherapy” and “Untitled Poem about Dying,” as mute acknowledgment of the limits of language reveals in the first word of the latter poem’s title, “Untitled.” In the following quote, the memorable simile, “like a canal lock,” provides the title for a poem about a waiting room where caregivers bide their time while cancer patients undergo tests and procedures on the day after Valentine’s Day: “The room has filled and emptied many times today, // like a canal lock passing ships into the darkness.”
Though the book’s first two sections display Taylor’s resilience and wit in the face of daunting loss, its final two sections, “Postcards” and “Change of Address,” give those qualities freer range and greater opportunity to shine in his lines. Taylor’s elegiac imperative inspires many poems, but it also leaves room for hope and recovery as well the play of language that gives delight.
-Lawrence Rhu
Lawrence Rhu is the Todd Professor of the Italian Renaissance emeritus at the University of South Carolina. He has written books and essays about the American and European Renaissances, and he edited Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale for the Evans Shakespeare series from Cengage. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Two Rivers, South Florida Poetry Journal, Forma de Vida, Jogos Florais, Quorum, Fall Lines, Pinesong, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina Yearbook. In 2018-19, three of his poems received named awards from the Poetry Society of South Carolina. A fourth, “Reading Romance with a Lady Killer,” received the 2018 Faulkner-Wisdom Poetry Award from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society in New Orleans. In 2019, his unpublished poetry collection, “Pre-owned Odyssey and Rented Rooms,” was runner-up for that Society’s Marble Faun Award. In 2020, Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies published or reprinted a dozen of his poems together with his essay on poetry and philosophy, “Other Minds and a Mind of One’s Own.”