The Log from the Sea of Cortez: A Poem Series by David Taylor (review)

I think John Steinbeck would have been pleased to know that David Taylor’s interest in The Log from the Sea of Cortez was piqued by a conversation in a Denton, Texas, pub called Riprocks. In that pub, Taylor’s friend and colleague at the University of North Texas, an environmental science professor, recommended Steinbeck and Ricketts’s book to Taylor, a writer and English professor, who found reading the book “a poetic experience” and responded in kind. The result is a lovely collection of twenty poems that speak of both Steinbeck’s and Taylor’s abilities with lyrical language and their sense of the beautiful connectedness among all things natural, psychological, and spiritual.

In the chapbook’s introduction, Taylor offers his book as the beginning of a conversation about the inevitable relationship between science and art, a conversation that could serve to create a broad community of possibility and understanding. The language of Taylor’s poems is both accessible and interdisciplinary, concrete and metaphysical. One recurrent theme in Taylor’s collection (as in the original Log) is the power and mystery of naming. In “Taxonomy,” Taylor writes,

. . . namesmake what we collectwhat we recognize.Katsuwonus pelamis.Pleuroncodes.Langustina.

Now all the thingswe see with language we know. . . .

(8)

And just as Ricketts and Steinbeck did as they collected, classified, and named, Taylor rehearses the wonder and deeper import of those activities:

We knew then that we were collecting ourselves,naming and renaming,rethinking our roots and limbs, calling each other newly by the names we had always usedbecause we began to know each otherand knowing is also not knowing, always a beginningto how we were connected—

(“From the Tide Pool to the Stars” 26–27)

Taylor’s free verse is unpretentious, always complementing and paying tribute to the lyricism of Steinbeck in the original Log, never trying to steal the literary show. Steinbeck and Ricketts are strong characters in the poetry series just as they are in the book, their love for their mission in the Sea of Cortez, for the Western Flyer crew, for language, for life, and for each other just as apparent in Taylor’s lines as it is in Steinbeck’s prose. The teleology that underpins the perspective of both Steinbeck and Ricketts is crystallized throughout the series, coming to a head in the poem “Easter Sunday Sermon.” It is Ed Ricketts who delivers that “sermon,” proclaiming with beer in hand that the answer to the why of life and any question of cause and effect in nature can be answered by the phrase “It’s so because it’s so.”

If you admire Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, you will undoubtedly appreciate Taylor’s poem series. You will enjoy studying the two-page map in the center of the chapbook (designed by John Thompson) that retraces the voyage of the Western Flyer. If you have not read The Log, Taylor’s work will serve as a wonderful introduction that will make you want to read the book that inspired the poetry. Like all good criticism, The Log from the Sea of Cortez: A Poem Series always points back to its literary subject, exploring and celebrating the original and its authors with an insightful, artful response.