Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons

Five years of short poetry from California's Poet Laureate. Al Young's poetry covers a wide range of subjects from a short euology to Rudolph Diesel (of diesel engine fame) to dawn at the Oakland airport when you've missed your plane, from the poor in San Francisco to the military in Washington. We are living in a time when not much poetry is being published. It is good to see that once in a while a publisher will take the risk to put out a book like this. We, and especially our children, need to be reminded that there is more to putting words together than the simple writing projects in school.