At the White Window

We bought a round flat crema cake /shaped like a moon /in Umbertide./ It looks like a phosphorescent frisbee./ We munch its wedges as the solstice turns. -- from "Landscape with Bees"David Young's poetic voice strikes its characteristic note here: wry modesty, mixed with love and longing for the world, and an invocation of the larger, mysterious cycles of natural change that surround and hold us. The poet writes of aging, acceptance, and, just to keep the reader on her toes, throws in the occasional surrealistic or metaphysical flight of fancy, as in "Landscape with Disappearing Poet," dedicated to the Czech scientist and poet Miroslav Holub, who died suddenly in 1998: Angels seem to fall/ steadily/ in a rain around barns and pastures,/ distressed by the way the cows/ slump to their knees on the kill-floor,.... In his ninth book of poetry, At the White Window, Young's work continues, affectionately and patiently, to explore and chart the various landscapes in which the poet finds or places himself: the small midwestern college town where Young has lived for forty years, Oberlin, Ohio; travels to Europe; the internal landscapes of memory and grief; the quirky repainting of Oberlin as though it were a series of panels on a Chinese scroll, with human figures and their concerns placed in proper proportion to towering cliffs, lofty mountains, and vast mist rises. Because Oberlin sits on a flat, glacier-razed piece of Ohio countryside, Young tweaks the Asian tradition by seeing the cliffs and mountains in the clouds that fill the skyscape, along with its "denizens [who] are crows and hawks, herons and gulls." Irony and whimsy keep sentimentality at bay in Young's poetry, while the passionate lyricism that perhaps led him to translate Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus some years ago manifests, sometimes ecstatically, sometimes more somberly, in this new volume: Or has she journeyed to a prairie/ where all our codes and grids have been abandoned,/ no houses, no towns, no roads; clear sky,/ a few birds riding aimlessly across it,/ and a bird or two, meadowlarks probably,/ tossing around in its depths? -- from "My Mother at Eighty-Eight"David Young is a poet of wide interests, encompassing but extending far beyond the literary, and a generous heart. The finely crafted poems in At the White Window reflect in myriad ways the poet's lifelong appreciation of T'ang dynasty poetry, Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, music, science, landscape painting, and nature. They are poems that resist the tyranny of despair and meaninglessness, instead advocating for a vision of the world that includes beauty and suffering in equal measures. This vision urges our responsibility as well: we create from what we see, but the seeing is also of our creation, a function of what, in the book's title poem, the poet terms "our unabashed humanity, both frame and view."

We bought a round flat crema cake / shaped like a moon /in Umbertide. /It looks like a phosphorescent frisbee. /We munch its wedges as the solstice turns. -- from `Landscape with Bees'David Young's poetic voice strikes its characteristic note here: wry modesty, mixed with love and longing for the world, and an invocation of the larger, mysterious cycles of natural change that surround and hold us. The poet writes of aging, acceptance, and, just to keep the reader on her toes, throws in the occasional surrealistic or metaphysical flight of fancy, as in `Landscape with Disappearing Poet,' dedicated to the Czech scientist and poet Miroslav Holub, who died suddenly in 1998: Angels seem to fall / steadily /in a rain around barns and pastures,/ distressed by the way the cows / slump to their knees on the kill-floor,.... In his ninth book of poetry, At the White Window, Young's work continues, affectionately and patiently, to explore and chart the various landscapes in which the poet finds or places himself: the small midwestern college town where Young has lived for forty years, Oberlin, Ohio; travels to Europe; the internal landscapes of memory and grief; the quirky repainting of Oberlin as though it were a series of panels on a Chinese scroll, with human figures and their concerns placed in proper proportion to towering cliffs, lofty mountains, and vast mist rises. Because Oberlin sits on a flat, glacier-razed piece of Ohio countryside, Young tweaks the Asian tradition by seeing the cliffs and mountains in the clouds that fill the skyscape, along with its `denizens [who] are crows and hawks, herons and gulls.' Irony and whimsy keep sentimentality at bay in Young's poetry, while the passionate lyricism that perhaps led him to translate Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus some years ago manifests, sometimes ecstatically, sometimes more somberly, in this new volume: Or has she journeyed to a prairie / where all our codes and grids have been abandoned, / no houses, no towns, no roads -- clear sky, / a few birds riding aimlessly across it, / and a bird or two, meadowlarks probably, / tossing around in its depths? -- from `My Mother at Eighty-Eight'David Young is a poet of wide interests, encompassing but extending far beyond the literary, and a generous heart. The finely crafted poems in At the White Window reflect in myriad ways the poet's lifelong appreciation of T'ang dynasty poetry, Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, music, science, landscape painting, and nature. They are poems that resist the tyranny of despair and meaninglessness, instead advocating for a vision of the world that includes beauty and suffering in equal measures. This vision urges our responsibility as well: we create from what we see, but the seeing is also of our creation, a function of what, in the book's title poem, the poet terms `our unabashed humanity, both frame and view.'