Ruth Taylor

Comet Wine Ruth Taylor

Comet Wine is a book of poems, not a collection of poems. Although it does not have a traditional narrative, it certainly does have an imagistic thread. She invites the reader to be, as s/he reads and experiences, the needle and thread that connects them. Comet Wine begins with "Prelude (A Poet's Work)": What is the poet's Work?/And why and oh why and oh why;" a job description that immediately makes it clear that this is not a 9?5 position. And by the end of the list we learn that it is above all "To write poems/that are misunderstood." The reader is orbited around the theme of love: poetic, personal, cosmic, sexual, sensual, unrequited, comic, and tragic, in a way that only a poet can and may. The language in these and most of Taylor’s poetry is one of a heightened, charged conversation. Structurally, the language is a marriage of the formal and the contemporary. Her ear for rhythm and metre and rhyme is impeccable. Many of her poems resonate with the rhythmic and aural complexity that makes one hear the sound images of Dylan Thomas and the drive of bebop and bar talk. Her poems, like good conversations, traverse the sacred, the profane, in tones of high seriousness and the bawdiest of humour, and include references to the esoteric, to myths, to the most complex sciences and to the pop?cultural—often in the same poem. The finest wines, according to Taylor, were made from grapes that grow in comet years. And I believe these poems were written during her comet years. —from the Introduction by Endre Farkas