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  • Beth McDermott (bio)
Late Father & Other Poems
Taylor Mali
Quercus Review Press
www.quercusreviewpress.wordpress.com/about/
116 Pages; Cloth, $18.99

It’s tempting to read Late Father & Other Poems as if it were Taylor Mali’s autobiography. The poems are ordered chronologically, a strategy that encourages the idea of a single poetic speaker, aged fifty, who takes deliberate steps to have the children he’d never planned on having. From “Childless Pantoum” to “Growing Family Pantoum” to “Ready To Go Pantoum,” the poems chart the steps of a man who meets someone, falls in love, and reexamines the past in light of his new relationship. “I let two wives talk me out of children,” Mali writes early in the collection, a stark contrast to, “We can’t leave until the toddler’s dressed. / And you should probably try to nurse the baby.” What could be the catalyst for such a profound change? Something clicks when the speaker meets “Rachel” — an event that triggers memories of his own father, who died when the speaker was a younger man. However, despite how autobiographical these poems may be, Late Father is a collection of poems designed to alternate a father’s devotion to his children with funny and honest depictions of their new normal. If you want poems that are truly about life with kids, look no further than white noise machines, diapers, a swallowed penny, video monitors, and shared bananas.

Mali is a performance poet, and I would imagine a listening audience would laugh or smile at the same moments that that I did. But the benefit of page poetry is that Mali’s gift for humor is woven into his line endings, rhyme schemes, and overall sense of timing. It’s also observable in the structure of Late Father, when love poems are side-by-side with short, pithy poems. For example, “Fatherhood Is Not a Thing You Have to Do” is about being a father and everything the position requires (such as saying “No, and Yes, and I love you”); it concludes “fatherhood is a place you must be found. / And it is the same place, every day, all the time.” As if to loosen the strictures of such a nearly impossible job description, Mali follows that poem with “I Wrote Another Poem About Fatherhood”:

about the importanceof simply being there.Every day. All the time.But before I recited it,I passed you backto the nanny.

Imagine if Samuel Taylor Coleridge had written such a thing in “Frost at Midnight” (1798). The Romantic undercurrent of Mali’s poetry — the autobiographical pose that appears to conflate Mali the poet with his speaker — isn’t isolated from socioeconomic forces.

Perhaps such forces come to bear most in the five “John Taylor Johnston” poems, the titles of which suggest a succession of fathers beginning with “John Taylor Johnston I.” The speaker’s “great-great grandfather ... founded The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” the place one visits in order to view, gaze, contemplate, or appreciate the “art collection” Johnston “bequeathed in its entirety.” I appreciated the way Mali handled this poem’s influence on the rest of the collection, especially the later poems that rest heavily on images of children. Whether it’s the speaker’s son “out cold” on the video monitor, “surrounded by his animals,” or his daughter “swaddled tight / but for one foot,” one is reminded that art isn’t made in a vacuum, and “There is no one way to live.” The father gazes at his son in the same way we gaze at John Taylor Johnston’s art; however, the former comes to realize his son will become his own person, despite the artistic impulse to capture him as he is now:

In the Great Hall, at the base of the stairs,[John Taylor Johnston] is carved in stone.And you were named for him,my father told me, which I understood to  meanthe entire museum was basically mine.

Maybe the speaker was a child himself when he felt like he owned “The Egyptian wing” and “The Temple of Dendur.” Regardless, the poems that follow “John Taylor Johnston...

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