News of the Living by Taylor Mervyn

It may be true, as often said, that journalism is the first draft of history. But to know how it felt to be alive at any point, to experience the world first-hand, poetry is the truest record. That’s why the poems in this new chapbook from Mervyn Taylor are so important, as poetry, yes, but also as documents of a crucial moment in time. That specific moment was the lockdown in New York City in response to the Covid-19 outbreak, and many of the these poems speak directly of and to that event, beginning with the opening poem that imagines the plants in the Botanic Gardens, blooming unseen. In another poem he writes of bears roaming an art gallery, an image of life as it might be without us, after us. This is news of the living, of a world from which we are excluded, hopefully temporarily, for which we are already growing nostalgic.