Review: The Masons by Peter Taylor // Jeremy Luke Hill
There’s a story behind this review. It could take a minute. You may as well get comfortable.
A few weeks ago, just before all social distancing broke loose, I wandered into a local thrift store to check out the used book section. I do this more or less regularly for all the thrift stores in town, looking mostly for older Canadian poetry, but also for whatever else might catch my eye. This particular trip was a successful one. I found Bronwyn Wallace’s Marrying into the Family (Oberon Press, 1980), Susan Musgrave’s A Man to Marry, a Man to Bury (McClelland & Stewart, 1979), Earle Birney’s Fall by Fury (McClelland & Stewart, 1978), D.G. Jones’ Under the Thunder the Flowers Light up the Earth (Coach House Press, 1977), and Peter Taylor’s Trainer (Paget Press, 1980).
An eclectic little pile, and all probably donated from the same collection, given the similarity in vintage. I was particularly pleased about the Wallace book, because I’d loaned my previous copy to a forgotten someone and have regretted it ever since. I stacked my new finds on my bedside table, but others soon got stacked on top, and it wasn’t until a pandemic created extra hours for pleasure reading that I got down to Peter Taylor’s Trainer.
As I picked it up, I suddenly had a half-recollection that there was another Peter Taylor book on my shelf that I hadn’t actually read. I went to check, and sure enough, there it was, The Masons, and with it the other half of my recollection.
I had come by the book six or seven years previously. I was starting to do some Guelph local publishing, and someone had put me in touch with Michael Ridley, then a librarian (now emeritus) at the University of Guelph. Michael graciously agreed to meet me for coffee, and he brought me the gift of a beautiful little chapbook. It was letterpress printed in Times Roman on Byronic Text paper, hand sewn, with a slipcover (cut out to reveal the title page beneath). It had been published in 1980 as a limited run of 226 copies by the now defunct Gryphon Press, which Michael had been involved with running at the University of Guelph in the late ’70s and early ’80s – The Masons.
It was lovely as an art object, and I thanked Michael for it very much, but for whatever reason I never did read it. I just put it on my shelf and forgot about it for half a decade, until a chance purchase in a thrift store and then a quarantine’s worth of time to fill brought it back to mind. And then I really liked it. Enough that I decided to review it, so I looked Peter Taylor up on the League of Canadian Poets website, found his phone number, and gave him a call.
He was able to give me a little of the chapbook’s history: it was written in England while he was doing work for his book Trainer, and the letter type they used on Gryphon Press’ nineteenth-century Challenge platen letterpress had been borrowed from Dreadnaught Books in Toronto. It turns out that Peter had worked at Gryphon Press with Michael Ridley, before going on to work at the Porcupine’s Quill, just up the road in Erin.
It was at about this point in the conversation that Peter mentioned how he and I had already met. He’d come by the Gordon Hill Press table at the Eden Mills Writers Festival last year, chatted with me for a bit, and bought some books. All of which goes to say, I guess, that the Canadian poetry world isn’t large, that it tends to circle around on itself unexpectedly, and that my memory doesn’t always work well enough to keep track of all its intersections.
The Masons itself, the little book that set this whole story in motion forty years ago, is only four poems long, each one a meditation on an English cathedral – Canterbury, York Minster, Saint Paul’s, and Coventry. They’re sonnets insofar as they’re fourteen lines long and usually have in the neighbourhood of ten syllables per line, but they have nothing like a rhyme scheme, and their rhythm isn’t rigorously iambic.
The poet begins the first poem by positioning himself as just “another tourist” to the cathedrals, and as being somewhat uncomfortable with that role. He is “curiously shamed by the mute ecstasies of God,” and “of the masons,” who have carved themselves as grotesques in the cathedral’s heights. Standing in Canterbury, the cathedral where Thomas Becket was murdered to become a saint and martyr to both the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, the poet asks, “Do the faithless have martyrs?” and this query seems to lay over the whole quartet of poems as a kind of founding problem. What role does a religious icon like a cathedral play in a world that is now curiously shamed of its martyrs and its religious ecstasies?
The middle poems go on to pose questions of their own; not at their beginning, but at the turn between octave and sestet. The second poem, named after York Minster Cathedral, asks, “Does a wall keep faith in?” as the poem pivots between two walls, one a wall of light that is the cathedral’s stained glass windows, and the other a wall of stone that runs around the city of York. To the poet, “they seem as one,” though the first is a “frail icon” and the second a “coiled serpent,” making the walls an ambiguous image of the cathedral in times of the faithless. They are at once a beautiful and delicate bearer of tradition, and serpentine coils that “besiege time in a war of silence.”
The third poem is named after Saint Paul’s Cathedral, where Admiral Nelson’s body is laid, and where a Nazi shell pierced the dome during the blitz, destroying the high altar but leaving the rest of the cathedral intact. In this warlike context, the poet says the cathedral “rides like a man-of-war beside the Thames,” and at the turn of the poem, he asks, “Do we worship warrior or saviour?” This question would seem to suggest that the function of the cathedral might still be to memorialize a different kind of martyr: the secular hero, the winner of battles, whether fought on the seas of Trafalgar or in the skies over Britain. The poet’s tone implies a kind of irony here, however, which he immediately acknowledges, confessing that his “contradictions embarrass the tomb.” In the end, he seems uncertain what to do with the cathedral as the resting place for fallen heroes. “Stone fades,” he says. “Hands fail. What endures is duty, / A silhouette in the blitz.”
Where the first poem asks what role the cathedral might play in a time ashamed of martyrs; where the second ambiguously explores the role of the cathedral as the keeper of tradition; and where the third embarrassedly suggests that it serve as the house of the secular warrior martyr, the last poem returns to the masons themselves. This closing poem is set in Coventry Cathedral, which was largely destroyed in the blitz—so much so that it needed to be rebuilt, with the surviving bits made to encompass a garden attached to the new, more modern building. The poet describes the fall of the church to the incendiary bombs, with “charred masons, crawling through dawn,” to “gather / God’s agony in a metaphor of stone.” He then says, without a question but instead—for the first time in the quartet—with a firm assertion, that to this metaphor, “Time does not heal but adds.”
And here, I think, the poet approaches an answer to the question that has shadowed his quartet of poems. The martyrs of a faithless time are those who rebuild, who take up the mantle of the masons, who make something new grow in the rubble of faith, “like an arm on scorched flesh.” The function of the cathedral is to “beckon the passionate industry of faith,” even when faith itself remains in ruins. In this sense, the final line of the final poem resonates as a kind of reinterpretation of the religious icon. “The cross hangs straight as a plumb line,” the poet says, transforming even the most central image of the faith into a tool intended for building, and for rebuilding, plumb and true.
Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press, a literary publisher based in Guelph, Ontario. He is also the Managing Director of Vocamus Writers Community, a non-profit community organization that supports book culture in Guelph. He has written a collection of poetry and short prose called Island Pieces, along with several chapbooks and broadsheets. His writing has appeared in ARC Poetry, The Bull Calf, CV2, EVENT Magazine, Filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, paperplates, Queen Mob’s Tea House, The Rusty Toque, The Town Crier, and The Windsor Review.
