|
A poetic journey through sorrowful loss and rediscovery of life.
Earthshine is a book about a wife’s illness and death from cancer and the aftermath of grief. It is, necessarily, painful. Yet David Young, is meditating on despair and the loss of love, has found the “day coming up again, the world enacting its own beginnings and everything moving in this earthshine.” The clouds and mountains still glisten. The earth is “a crystal where light is sorted and stored,” a “tiny beacon in the hurting dark.”
But before new light is the dark, and David Young leads the way through the dark carefully, gently, in restrained yet penetrating words, from the shock of discovery (“the first death”) to surgery, liver scans, the rude details of disease, the tightening circle of pain, the dwindling body, the spreading sorrow. Then, the search for light—at first there comes “an afterglow of love,” then misery starts “to slip away” and a sky displays a blue radiance. “The tears that filled me up fill with light now.”
“David Young’s art is exact and exacting—you can’t help being moved by this straightforward account of his wife’s death. Nor can you help joining in the redemptive, clear-eyed commitment to look again at all of the things in the world backlit by grief. These poems do what poems should—they save a little of the world, they surprise us with our own constancy and strength.”—Dennis Schmitz
“Earthshine is a book both literally and figuratively of cycles and these cycles unravel in individual poems that are passionate, wise, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, joyful. David Young has contributed a great deal to American poetry during the past twenty or so years—as a teacher, essayist, editor, translator and poet, but never so much as with this book of the articulate, the healing, the ongoing heart.”—Thomas Lux
|
|
DAVID YOUNG is the author of five other books of poetry: Sweating Out the Winter, Boxcars, Work Lights: Thirty-Two Prose Poems, The Names of a Hare in English, and Foraging (Wesleyan, 1986). He is also a translator of five books including Sonnets to Orpheus (Wesleyan, 1987). A professor of English at Oberlin College, Young received a B.A. from Carlton College (1958) and a Ph.D. from Yale in 1965. He edits Field, a literary magazine, and serves as an arbiter of Field’s translation series. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio.
|
|
|
|
