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In Country of Warm Snow, the author seeks to represent the duality of a life lived in two places at once. It is the life of an immigrant who has been in the US for fifty-odd years, whose heart, when he’s in one place, yearns for the other. To combat the geographical dislocation, there arises the invention of an impossible land, a country of the imagination, a snow that is beautiful, and warm.
I don’t believe I’ll read any work this year with more memorable characters than those in Country of Warm Snow. The streets of Brooklyn, Flatbush, and environs, are alive with felt life, because Mervyn Taylor knows how to see and what to hear. This is poetry of the people, and this writer shows he can really tell stories. The book’s social issues rock with swag and style - tender and tough - creating a new mythology for America with stories in poetry’s best voice. -Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate
These poems are wonderful. They pay attention to the pedestrian details of real life, and the dreams of the audience of the Mighty Sparrow. They are brilliant, transcendent, and abundant with the exquisite dance of the everyday. Mervyn Taylor combines the strains of Derek Walcott with the grit of Etheridge Knight. -Walter Mosley, author of Devil in a Blue Dress
Mervyn Taylor’s Country of Warm Snow salutes citizens, documented or not, of an unjust yet wondrous world. Taylor is that indispensable poet who clothes himself in the painstaking work of an immigrant tailor, and marvels, ‘I only know that when/I stand before the mirror, my old suit//looks new, and that I would hide him/in my house, and feed him whatever/kind of soup it is they love over there.’ -Suzanne Cleary, author of Beauty Mark and Crude Angel.
Now these poems come to us, each a Faberge egg, intricate, bejewelled, smuggled across the border, telling stories while keeping scerets, made of indestructible elements yet prone to vanishing, until we realise each beautiful recit is a fiction grounded in truth and Mervyn Taylor has, through heart-rending surfaces, shown us a globe profoundly without boundary.
-Andre Bagoo
