Ecstatic Destinations

by Keith Taylor

In Ecstatic Destinations, Keith Taylor takes us on a walk through his neighborhood in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His joyous and often wry observations of chance encounters, his neighbors, parks, the history of his own backyard, plus the ever present traffic, spark us to reimagine both the layers of our own most intimate, if everyday environments and our place in them.

On the surface, the book can be said to start and end on a park bench. Keith walks all year and we can feel the passing of the seasons. We get his easy familiarity with his regular stops along the way, the neighbors he meets, everyone's yards, their trees, and the sounds that surround it all. Night has set by the end; we have arrived.

Artist Mary Shea complements Keith's journey of reflection and ecstasy with her cover paintings and interior drawings and prints.

34 pages, Paperback

Published May 23, 2018

About the author

Keith Taylor was born in British Columbia in 1952. He spent his childhood in Alberta and his adolescence in Indiana. After several years of traveling, he moved to Michigan, where he earned his M.A. in English at Central Michigan University. He has worked as a camp-boy for a hunting outfitter in the Yukon, as a dishwasher in southern France, a housepainter in Indiana and Ireland, a freight handler, a teacher, a freelance writer, the co-host of a radio talk show, and as the night attendant at a pinball arcade in California. For more than twenty years he worked as a bookseller in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Then he taught in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Michigan, and directed the Bear River Writers Conference. From 2010–2018 he worked as the Poetry Editor at Michigan Quarterly Review. He retired from the University of Michigan in 2018. He lives with his wife in Ann Arbor; they have one daughter.

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Keith Taylor]

I won't rate this, but I wanted to get this good short review on here that appeared in the Ann Arbor Observer back when the book came out:

Keith Taylor
Ecstatic Destinations
by Megan Inbody

From the July, 2018 issue

In a 2011 interview with Michigan Quarterly Review, the poet (and Observer contributor) Keith Taylor explained his admiration for birds: "They fly. They sing. They go on long mysterious migrations and return to the same small spaces." The same could be said about the poems in his latest chapbook, Ecstatic Destinations. Although the poems are geographically limited to a "triangle formed by Dexter Avenue, North Maple Road, and Jackson Avenue," they are broad in scope.

Academically, it's not kosher to assume the speaker of a poem is the poet himself, but with this book, so rooted in Taylor's experience of Ann Arbor, I think it's a safe assumption. He portrays himself as an Old Poet in the vein of Yeats, most literally in the first poem, "The Old Poet, In Plein Air," which announces his age as a condition of his poetry. Age is a tone, a mood: paradoxically, as the aging body leads to a narrowing of traversed space, the speaker gains a more expansive view. This feeling of transcendence is a type of ecstasy. A walk by a skateboard park yields a vision of skaters as angels: "skateboarders glide silently through the air / their gossamer wings invisible." "The Sledding Hill," although a repository of "lost mittens / and piles of frozen dog shit," also preserves echoes of "laughter / and the possibility of delight." For Taylor, it seems that age is itself an ecstatic destination.

This isn't to say the aging process is romanticized. There's a wry mention in one poem of "imperious lifeguards" with "lanky summer bodies." In another poem, the poet is mistaken for a homeless person as he sits writing on a bench. Age has its indignities, but for Taylor, it has its compensations.

Nature, of course, is another major theme--it would hardly be a Taylor collection without an enduring attention to the natural world. The collection's sense of transcendence also comes from Taylor's interest in "volunteer" plants. Though none of the poems directly deal with these plants that others may deem nuisances, they exist on the periphery of multiple poems, settled but uneasy. In "Therapy," the poet works to reclaim the lot behind his house, which formerly had been a vineyard: "By the time I was able to buy the empty lot, the grapes had gone wild and volunteer redbuds, mulberry trees, box elders, and little wild cherry trees had taken over."

"In a Corner" depicts
trees without edges

blur around a landscape
of ochre
violet
or mauve

nervous trees that don't
belong in town

crazy trees
wild volunteers
With this volume, Taylor, a volunteer himself--a Canadian native who planted himself in Ann Arbor--shows that volunteers have the best sense of place because they make their own place. They also serve as a necessary reminder that our prosperous little burg (like the aging body) exists on nature's sufferance. Taylor revels in nature's beauty and relentless unintentionality, its determination to thrive in the midst of urban order.

[Donna Wessel Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite poems of closely observed daily life.