He asks, in no. 32 of the sequence,
Why this need to dig, lying
in a hot autumn sun, to push
fingers, feet, through sand
as though groping for coins,
for a vanished continent? Why
this sifting, this searching
among sand husks for what
we know already …
why does sand provoke us this way?

I can recognise the sand, the ocean, the cliffs he brings into these poems because I spent my childhood digging into sandy beaches and now I watch my children delighted to dig down to the water or to half-bury themselves alive in the sand. In Sandstone, Taylor has given us a minor Paterson. These poems from his childhood territory are so detailed and so provoking that they speak to a wider Australian experience:

A continent crumbles and stops
and drops here to a bed of white sand
beneath water from a brochure. Spray
breaks on the horizon’s reef and beyond that
sea a thousand metres deep …

O’Hara wrote that the light in Japan respects poets. If that is so, then Taylor demonstrates here that in Australia it is the coastline that respects poets.

The word sandstone carries within it an oxymoron for it refers to both stone’s solidity and sand’s shapeless flow. This sort of tension is present throughout the ‘Sandstone’ sequence. As much as the beach is a place of youth and ‘blind nubility’ it is a place of bleached bones, reminders of death. ‘Sand, I don’t understand it … Sand is miniscule bone, it hugs/flesh, toes, shins. I don’t understand/how we can turn into sand, who/love it as beaches …’ Like Hardy, Taylor brings his time of life and his questioning of death to the landscape, but at the same time he brings his landscape to life so vividly that it stands apart from him and indifferent to him.

This sequence of thirty-seven poems is a tense, deeply personal document, yet still a coolly sophisticated achievement as poetry. Taylor’s language is always simple and straightforward while the associations, the images, and the questions are as difficult as they need to be. Taylor’s ocean beach is wider and simpler than Hart Crane’s ‘fresh ruffles of the surf’ where ‘bright striped urchins flay each other with sand … gaily digging and scattering’. In Taylor’s version,

The air was clear.
The sand was clean. Waves
crinkled and rolled like banknotes
and no-one there to catch them except me
and a girl who unfurled from the shade
of the life-guard’s lookout, late
that morning in 1958.

In ‘Sandstone’, Taylor’s project of writing a poetry of the inner life based upon images of the physical world is outstandingly successful. The long sequence of small poems also gives the reader a feeling for the poet returning each day to the same places where he can test himself again and again against his chosen material. There is a sense of the dailiness of writing, of a poet working ceaselessly at his craft.

The title sequence occupies a little over half the book. The other poems here are similarly introspective without being abstract, but perhaps because their focus is less acute they do not come alive for me in as convincing a manner. There is a teasing dream sequence of nine poems during which his dream, ‘displaying its yellow teeth’, takes up residence with him somewhat in the manner the atomic bomb moved in with Myron Lysenko:

After a difficult day he and the dream
have a blazing row …
unintelligible messages
left on the kitchen bench must go.

These dream poems take a tilt at Freud who is seen to be as much a conman and bully as the intrusive dream. There are warm poems of domesticity, parenthood, and love which risk appearing complacent and boastful. When a poem to his twelve-year-old daughter begins, ‘Your mother is truly / a beautiful woman’, we might consider quietly passing on to the next poem without interrupting the poet by actually reading the poem. However, Taylor manages to bring the death carriage of the Twentieth Century, ‘rickety and leaking dangerous substances’, into the poem and ends by urging his daughter to burn his poems if it will help her survive whatever holocaust the next century might resurrect. Tough advice, and an interesting lesson on the usefulness of poetry.