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 has published six books and chapbooks and his poems have appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Descant, The Ekphrastic Review, Grain, Into the Void and The Toronto Quarterly. His writing has been published in Australia, the Caribbean, India, Ireland, the Netherlands, Romania, Singapore, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. His first collection, Trainer, a mosaic of poems capturing his father’s experience as a pilot during the Second World War, with an introductory poem by Raymond Souster, was called “a work of scholarship and imagination” by John Robert Colombo (The Globe and Mail). His experimental verse play, Antietam, won honourable mention in the international War Poetry Contest in Northampton, Massachusetts. He holds a master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Waterloo and has worked as a printer and bookbinder, medical publisher, institute director and non-profit executive. Born in Edmonton, he lives in Aurora, Ontario.

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