I have been reading these poems for some weeks, learning this poet who is new to me. enjoying this journey across his career, the first poem dated 1964 and the last from 2022. Seeing how his style changes and morphs, noting imagery and themes that reoccur. The more I read, the more I felt the poems enter and transform me. The more lines I noted, underlined, reread, poems I returned to for a second reading but that felt already like old friends.

The first poem. Late Summer: Lake Erie, describes returning to a summer cottage, a year after death came calling, the natural descriptions so beautiful, even if “the killer lake” is a place of death. Nature, returning, death, are reoccurring themes in these poems.

But so is love. In “Love Song”, for Chloe, he writes: “She’s my summer/peaches, corn, long moondawn dusks/watermelons chilling in a tub of ice and water: mirrored there/the great midsummer sky/rolling with clouds and treetops/and down by the lake/the wild canaries/swinging on the horsemint/all morning long.” This is the image on the book cover, the mirrored clouds, the water, the lake.

“Nine Deaths” is heart-rending, the history of his wife’s cancer, the treatment, living with cancer, dying from cancer, ending with “Your deaths are over/My dreams begin.”

The loss of the beloved is poignantly remembered in March 10, 2001:

Three crisscrossed daffodils
faint lamps in the rubble

where without any warning
I’m shattered by your absence

wondering will I always
blunder into this emotion

so large and mute it has no name
–not grief longing pain

for those are only its suburbs
its slightly distracting cousins–

summoned just now by these
frilled blossoms

butter yellow horns
on lemon yellow stars

indifferent innocent
charging in place

advance guard of a season
when I will join you.

Young imagines life after his father’s passing in “My Father at Ninety-Four.”

Other poems are playful. “Poem about Hopping” includes images of rabbits and bighorn and salmon and grasshoppers, “A Lowercase Alphabet” describes letters: “b: hang up the little dipper;” “d: the dipper in the mirror;” p: the dipper dead and buried.”

I will return to these poems again and again.

In the long march that takes us all our life,
in and out of sleep, sun up, sun gone,
our aging back and forth, smiling and puzzled,
there comes these times: you stop and look,

and fix on something unremarkable,
a parking lot or just a patch of summer,
but it will flare and resonate

and you’ll feel part of it for once

from Walking Home on an Early Spring Evening by David Young

Thanks to A. A. Knopf for a free ARC. ( )