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Summary
Summary
A beautiful book of both grief and birth from the award-winning poet whose work thrills his audience with its immediate emotional impact and musical riffs.
A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of the poet's father, we witness the unfolding of his grief. "In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor," he tells us, in one of the collection's piercing two-line poems. Young captures the strange silence of bereavement- "Not the storm/ but the calm/ that slays me." But the poet acknowledges, even celebrates, life's passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence describing the birth of his son- in "Crowning," he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing "her face/ full of fire, then groaning your face/ out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air." Ending this book of birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking "What good//are wishes if they aren't/ used up?" while understanding "How to listen/ to what's gone."
Author Notes
Kevin Young is the author of seven previous books of poetry, including Ardency- A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, winner of a 2012 American Book Award, and Jelly Roll , a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the editor of eight other collections, most recently The Hungry Ear- Poems of Food & Drink . Young's book The Grey Album- On the Blackness of Blackness, won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He is currently the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his eighth poetry collection, Young (Ardency) offers an impressively musical exploration of grief and endurance. Drawing its title from the illuminated manuscripts that contained psalms and prayers, the book is divided into five symbolically headed chapters. The tension between death and creation, and the poet's struggle to contain both, fuels these short-lined poems whose delicate gears deploy insight with heartbreaking accuracy. The opener, "Domesday Book," acknowledges the passing of the poet's father: "Strange how you keep on/ dying-not once/ then over// & done with-" and treats grief with frank honesty and an alluring, yet almost unsettlingly steady, rhythm: "How terrible/ to have to pick up// the pen, helpless/ to it, your death/ not yet// a habit." The subsequent sections, "The Book of Forgetting" and "Confirmation," move past the book's initial death into new sorrow, "What remains// besides pain?/ How to mourn what's just/ a growing want?" Though the poems are ripe with pain, they also contain moments of reverberating joy, as when the speaker in "Expecting" hears his son's heartbeat during a sonogram: "You are like hearing/ hip-hop for the first time-power// hijacked from a lamppost-all promise." Young wrestles with loss and joy with enviable beauty and subtlety. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Young is adept at netting the sensations of the moment and retrieving the spirit of the past in poems of monumental grief, stoicism, rapture, and sharp humor. In his eighth collection, Young marks the tenth anniversary of his father's unexpected death, telling the story of the stunned aftermath with striking attunement to the utter transformation of what had been ordinary life. His tone is elegiac as he describes picking up his father's effects at the hospital. He marvels over the strange munificence of organ donation, and when he acknowledges the poignant kinship he feels with his father's dogs, he quips, Brothers in paw. Young is a virtuoso of succinctness, which in this book has particularly deep resonance: The grammar of grief / gets written each day / & lost--and learnt again / by stone, by small / sliver, hieroglyph. As he takes measure of paternal absence, he prepares to become a father, writing with awe of the astonishments of pregnancy and the revelations of ultrasound. From intimate reflections on the mysteries of the body, Young turns his penetrating attention to sky and land as though on a vision quest, tracking the sun and moon, desert and valley, wildflowers and geese in cosmic poems of life's essentials and the great wheel of existence. He concludes, Why not sing. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
Library Journal Review
As its title suggests, Young's eighth book of poems (after Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels) is a vigil in verse. Two vigils, in fact: one held in bereavement for his deceased father, the other in anxious anticipation of his son's birth. In thin, almost painfully paced lyric strands as bleak as "trees/ born bare," Young monitors every emotional nuance that accompanies deep, personal loss ("How terrible/ to have to pick up/ the pen, helpless/ to it, your death/ not yet/ a habit....") and the promise of regeneration ("Tonight/ I'll broom what/ soon will be your nursery"). Rooted in pessimism ("This world is rigged/ with ruin"), the poems nevertheless channel a universe of perceptive thought on both the end and the beginning of life through a deceptively narrow tonal range that largely avoids easy sentiment, a difficult accomplishment given the familiar subject matter. VERDICT At the risk of some repetitiveness, Young challenges his large themes with a master craftsman's discipline and determination, delivering proof that poetry, like birth, is "a lengthy process/ meant to help us believe/ in the impossible."-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Bereavement Behind his house, my father's dogs sleep in kennels, beautiful, he built just for them. They do not bark. Do they know he is dead? They wag their tails & head. They beg & are fed. Their grief is colossal & forgetful. Each day they wake seeking his voice, their names. By dusk they seem to unremember everything-- to them even hunger is a game. For that, I envy. For that, I cannot bear to watch them pacing their cage. I try to remember they love best confined space to feel safe. Each day a saint comes by to feed the pair & I draw closer the shades. I've begun to think of them as my father's other sons, as kin. Brothers-in-paw. My eyes each day thaw. One day the water cuts off. Then back on. They are outside dogs-- which is to say, healthy & victorious, purposeful & one giant muscle like the heart. Dad taught them not to bark, to point out their prey. To stay. Were they there that day? They call me like witnesses & will not say. I ask for their care & their carelessness-- wish of them forgiveness. I must give them away. I must find for them homes, sleep restless in his. All night I expect they pace as I do, each dog like an eye roaming with the dead beneath an unlocked lid. Memorial Day Thunder knocks loud on all the doors. Lightning lets you inside every house, white flooding the spare, spotless rooms. Flags at half mast. And like choirboys, clockwork, the dogs ladder their voices to the dark, echoing off each half-hid star. Greening It never ends, the bruise of being--messy, untimely, the breath of newborns uneven, half pant, as they find their rhythm, inexact as vengeance. Son, while you sleep we watch you like a kettle learning to whistle. Awake, older, you fumble now in the most graceful way--grateful to have seen you, on your own steam, simply eating, slow, chewing--this bloom of being. Almost beautiful how you flounder, mouth full, bite the edges of this world that doesn't want a thing but to keep turning with, or without you-- with. With. Child, hold fast I say, to this greening thing as it erodes and spins. Excerpted from Book of Hours: Poems by Kevin Young All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.