Black Lab
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

David Young has published ten books of poetry since 1968, when his first collection, Sweating Out the Winter, won the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum. His newest collection, published in February 2006, is Black Lab (Knopf).

“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

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