Cities Within Us: Volume 309

Cities Within Us offers poems that are dense and deep with language that resonates at multiple levels and often startles with its juxtapositions and verbal explosions. From the intimately personal to the dramatically confessional, Peter Taylor’s poems capture a purse seine of discordant voices, including a piece of type, a bee, an orang-outang, Franklin, the delusional and the abused in a universe that seems both unlimited and inevitable. Images and emotions move the reader from the disappearance of arctic explorers to the razing and rebirth of the Dresden Frauenkirche to the comic innocence of a child’s visit to Mars in poems that explore the inner landscapes of imagination and reality, and the intimate capacity for joy and loss.

Peter Taylor received my MA in English from the University of Waterloo after receiving three awards for scholarship as an undergraduate at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Trainer, visualizing flight training during WWII (Paget Press); The Masons, four meditations on English cathedrals; First Epistle to Dr. Torr, a mock heroic satire (Gryphon Press); and Aphorisms (Adela Press). His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada and Australia. He lives in Aurora, Ontario.