At the white window / David Young.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Young, David, 1936-

Language:

English

Physical Description:

vii, 76 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Columbus : Ohio State University Press, [2000]

Summary:

This new collection of poems, David Young's ninth, is centered in the place wher he has lived for forty years--Oberlin, Ohio--but its reach is both wide and deep. It takes in myth, history, natural history, and imaginative constructs of many kinds; it confidently joins itself to the long tradition of poetry streching back to bards and shamans.

Quietly, vividly, persistently, Young lets language and ordinary experience lead him to new places and new insights. His formal range takes in the prose poem and the sonnet, the villanelle, and the free verse lyric, but his voice is distinctive and musical throughout. The book opens with an elegiac section, commemorating, among others, Young's mother and 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 and 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, and Stanley Kunitz for the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum.

Contents:

Exceptions to the Rule vii

Poem for Adlai Stevenson and Yellow Jackets 3

July Morning Vision 5

Wind, Rain, Light 6

Lessons in Metaphysics 8

My Mother at Eighty-Eight 9

Landscape with Disappearing Poet 10

Landscape with Grief Train 14

My Father at Ninety-Four 15

Landscape with Wolves 16

Elegy Lacking in Grace 17

Landscape with Bees 21

Chopping Garlic 26

Dinner Time 27

The Light Collector 28

Homage to William Carlos Williams 30

That Spring 32

I Did Say "Miramar," Didn't I? 34

Four Ghazals on Shakespearean Themes 36

Notes from the Provinces 40

At the White Window 41

The Snow Bird 45

Two Moments in Italy 46

Omaha Dances 48

Midwestern Families 50

Phenomenology for Dummies 52

Four Songs on a Bone Flute 53

October's STem and Headpiece 56

March 30, 1997 57

Lullaby for the Elderly 58

The House Was Quiet on a winter Afternoon 59

Cloudstown Lightfall: Prelude and Ten Sonnets 63

"American place names, even a crossroads..." 63

1 "A Cloudstown painter, I make a huge canyas" 64

2 "In an old house, high up under gables" 65

3 "So young, but in some downright way she knows" 66

4 "Clouds and poems. They float by. We ponder" 67

5 "Cold boiling sky. I feel at home beneath it" 68

6 "These clouds are flat and gray below, sunlit" 69

7 "Horse tails. Feather whips. Brush strokes. The pencil-" 70

8 "Above the gym, the city of potatoes" 71

9 "Especially in daylight the town goes dreaming" 72

10 "Clouds part and shafts of light, wedges that spread" 73.

ISBN:

081420855X

0814250599

OCLC:

43441298