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fieldlightshadow

Field of Light and Shadow
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)

“A career-spanning volume from one of our most valuable living American poets, offering poems that display an exquisite ear tuned to the natural world, to love and friendship, and to the continually renewable possibilities of language. David Young’s settings are at once local and universal—an adolescence in Omaha, late summer on Lake Erie, a sleepless night in the backyard during a meteor shower. He moves with dazzling ease between culture and nature, between the literary and the philosophical, microcosm and macrocosm. Here are poems on Osip Mandelstam and Chairman Mao, the meaning of boxcars on the track, the beautiful names of the months, and a fox at the field’s edge, charged in each case by Young’s fierce intelligence and candor in the face of grief and loss.

“We float through space. Days pass,” Young writes in “The Portable Earth-Lamp.” “Sometimes we know we are part of a crystal / where light is sorted and stored.” His metaphysical reach, balancing remarkable humility with penetrating vision, is one of the great gifts of this exemplary career in poetry.”

rule

Black Lab
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

“That time shall prove to be a friend, shall augment our powers rather than eroding them, shall nurture wisdom, flexibility, aptness, wit: how rare are the poems that make this wish reality. How heartening when such poems appear, as they do, in abundance, in David Young’s Black Lab. Mortality leaves its prints all over the page, like a big black dog, and, gorgeous, unstoppable, pulls on its leash toward joy-in-the-moment, sorrow-in-joy. Black Lab is the richest, and most richly posed, of Young’s fine books.”
—Linda Gregerson

“In keeping with the whole heart of all his work, David Young’s Black Lab draws from a variety of sources—a fellowship of poets, an intimacy of landscape, a celebration of the elegy—yet comes, in each of the poems, to a single, and singular, place of rest, calm, and clarity. There is a quality of beatitude, an elevation of the quotidian, a defining of value here. This is a book to carry, to rejoice in on those dark days.”
—Stanley Plumly

Other Poetry Titles

 

 

© Copyright 2011 by David Young, All Rights Reserved.