This new collection of poems David Youngs ninth is centered in the placewhere he has lived for forty years Oberlin Ohio but its reach is bothwide and deep. It... » 

This new collection of poems David Youngs ninth is centered in the placewhere he has lived for forty years Oberlin Ohio but its reach is bothwide and deep. It takes in myth history natural history and imaginativeconstructs of many kinds it confidently joins itself to the long tradition ofpoetry stretching back to bards and shamans.Quietly vividly persistently Young lets language and ordinary experiencelead him to new places and new insights. His formal range takes in the prosepoem and the sonnet the villanelle and the free verse lyric but his voice isdistinctive and musical throughout. The book opens with an elegiac sectioncommemorating among others Youngs mother and his friend the poet MiroslavHolub. It closes with a sequence of ten sonnets Cloudstown Lightfall thatfeatures Oberlin in the way a village might be featured in a series of panelsfor a Chinese painted screen. These poems will delight readers who areencountering David Young for the first time and confirm the enthusiasm of thosewho have followed his work since 1969 when his first collection Sweating Outthe Winter was selected by William Stafford Isabella Gardner and StanleyKunitz for the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum. «