Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them-of us-poetry can save. Whether it's the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. "Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don't know / are his dead." "We sleep long, / if not sound," Kevin Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, "Till the end/ we sing / into the wind." In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South-one poem, "Kith," exploring that strange bedfellow of "kin"-the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. But other things are possible too, and it’s worth considering, amid the hurricane of pages, what still, small poems one might have waited for.A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, called "one of the poetry stars of his generation" ( Los Angeles Times). There are so many books, we think, with so many lines that say so many things at such length - how could any of this be marginal? Surely the center of this storm of words must be magnificent. But we are far from Frost today and deep into an anxiety of overproduction. Young publishes more than most, but even a writer like Louise Glück, who is routinely described as acetic, has amassed a page total that dwarfs that of Robert Frost. Why is he doing it? Maybe because nearly everyone is. Young is a gifted writer he surely knows this isn’t helpful. For instance, you have metaphors that don’t cohere.Perfunctory poeticisms are attached to things as banal as sausage. what you get, when you’re a traditional lyric poet publishing at this rate, is slackness. But if Young’s work gives you reason to hope, it also makes you think the poetry world’s precarious position may be hurting some of its strongest talents. At his best, Young reminds us that poetry’s middle voice remains a resonant instrument. But he can throw salt in the pot when it’s needed. The best collection yet from an important and much celebrated US poet - the poetry editor of the New Yorker and director of the Smithsonian National Museum. Young is an expansive, almost relaxed writer blistering intensity isn’t his signature. The voice is casual, although you’ll never doubt you’re reading poetry.
0 kommentar(er)
