The Last Train
$20.00
“I’m starting to feel the womb again,” Mervyn Taylor announces early in this new collection of poetry; and for him to be born again, he must travel back “Where We Began” through his childhood in Trinidad, through memories of family and especially of his father, “responsible / for keeping the trains moving.” Taylor keeps us moving as well, conducting us on a journey across the Caribbean and through his life in Brooklyn aboard The Last Train. The book is dedicated to Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill, and the middle section is a “Jamaica suite” recalling times the two poets spent together, a place where “you better listen to the beat.” The closing section “What Became of Us” brings us up to the traumatic present, with George Floyd and other police killings, immigrant family separations, lives lost to apartment blazes, and the war in Ukraine. But this is a story of survivors, and survival, and Taylor’s closing poem observes how on Trinidad and Tobago the sea strand is public property, a commons that recalls origins and promises a future: “like flotsam we arrived, / and like driftwood, we stayed.”