Curios: Poems

In Curios, her first collection of poetry, Judith Taylor emerges as the speediest meditative poet since Emily Dickinson. Her poems set off for all the worthy old ontological destinations, but what new routes they discover! Taylor can cover more ground in eight lines than most poets manage in eighty. But her rapid transit is accomplished without loss of density or emotional resonance.

Taylor's love of literary tales is deeply embedded in-and extended by-her poems. References to Wilde, Rilke, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Charlotte Bronte, and Lady Murasaki are rife, as are characters from fairy tales and children's stories. Even familial figures take on archetypal roles, lending the speaker's personal memory a mythic significance. The most pronounced motifs in Curios suggest a world enriched by fantasy: ghosts, fans, screens, masks, silk, windows, dreams, and curtains. But Taylor makes apparent that her imagination has bloomed not only to augment but to accommodate the world's multifariousness: I wanted everything connected to everything in a logical universe. / . . . In time, the world begins to shape your stubborn mind. ("She's Got Mail")

This debut collection is remarkable not only for its consistent style but also because it showcases a new form of poem-her own invention-a "curio" in itself. In extended lines, usually seven to eight, Taylor delivers deadpan statements and poses questions that are startlingly provocative-more like koans than interrogatives. Her poems range widely and wildly, at times taking surrealistic turns, yet they always maintain contact with the earth. It is a bonus to the reader that Taylor's grounding wire is humor. Even as the poems astonish by their swiftness, daring, and the accuracy of their surprising connections, they make us laugh: Do the stars hiss when they slash across the sky, cooling down? / Get a grip on yourself, said Mother often. ("Excess")

The volume's title, Curios, is remarkably apt. With unexpected images and questions reminiscent of childhood, Taylor riddles the surface of perception. These poems prove that curiosity-and imagination-will get the best of us. This title received a grant from the Greenwall Fund of The Academy of Ameri