Description: This new collection of poems, David Young's ninth, is centered in the place where he has lived for forty years-Oberlin, Ohio-but its reach is both wide & deep. It takes in myth, history, natural history, & imaginative constructs of many kinds; it confidently joins itself to the long tradition of poetry stretching back to bards & shamans. Quietly, vividly, persistently, Young lets language & ordinary experience lead him to new places & new insights. His formal range takes in the prose poem & the sonnet, the villanelle, & the free verse lyric, but his voice is distinctive & musical throughout. The book opens with an elegiac section, commemorating, among others, Young's mother & his friend the poet Miroslav Holub. It closes with a sequence of ten sonnets, "Cloudstown Lightfall," that features Oberlin in the way a village might be featured in a series of panels for a Chinese painted screen. These poems will delight readers who are encountering David Young for the first time & confirm the enthusiasm of those who have followed his work since 1969, when his first collection, Sweating Out the Winter, was selected by William Stafford, Isabella Gardner, & Stanley Kunitz for the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum.

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