The Green Waves by Rob Taylor
First electronic edition
ISBN 978-1-9994442-9-7
Praise for The Green Waves:
Luminosity, the ability to make mundane objects glow while holding onto their “thing-ness,” is a difficult poetic skill to master. Rob Taylor has managed to do just that in The Green Waves – and with Al Purdy relentlessly peering over his shoulder, no less.
- Michael Mirolla, publisher at Guernica Editions and author of The Facility, Berlin, The Formal Logic of Emotion, Hothouse Loves & Other Tales, Interstellar Distances/Distanze Interstellari, and Light and Time
I love how these poems tackle the subjects of grief, joy and family in a subtle, sweet-bitter landscape. The collection is an immensely powerful and inventive way to tell a story everyone can relate to.
- Bola Opaleke, author of Skeleton of a Ruined Song
Throw another log on the woodstove; spring has “hitched back to Toronto.” Driving the country roads of memory and legacy, Taylor address his young son sleeping in his car seat, his father’s ashes, his wife whose arm rests “on the lip of fat above my hip,” and even Purdy himself, thanking him “For ferrying nothing, not one blooming word, with you across its black eye.” Tender and human, these poems allow us to see the unseen dust that settles on everything.
- Bren Simmers, author of Narratives of the Lost, Hastings-Sunrise, and Night Gears
“I doubt you’d have liked me. I don’t drink. / I make nice. I stunt my opinions.” Without romanticizing or acquiescing, Rob Taylor’s collection pays tribute to larger-than-life Canadian poetry icon Al Purdy, and the A-Frame Al and Eurithe built on Roblin Lake. By turns moving and quietly humorous, these poems inhabit the A-Frame with a new dailiness of parenting, mice, loss, and attention to place—adding to the legacy of one of the most storied dwellings in Canadian literature.
- Anna Swanson, author of The Nights Also
Featuring cover art by Kailee Wakeman
Scroll down for an excerpt
Excerpt: "Last Embers"
- Louise Glück
from the kitchen sink, laughing at your mid-sentence
pause delivering Purdy’s line—“during the fall
plowing a man”—the embers going as poems go
as we go barefoot back and forth across the grass,
the house blazing behind sliding glass, but really
just waiting and warm, the baby asleep further inside,
maybe waking as the glass opens and closes, feeling
how it shifts the air, smelling embers, tasting smoke,
hearing his parents’ laughter and knowing then
that the night, too, requires attendance,
and sensing a jealousy gather faintly around him,
too faintly, and easily shaking its hold.