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Poems
Knopf
March 2014
On Sale: March 4, 2014
208 pages
ISBN: 0307272249
EAN: 9780307272249
Hardcover
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Fiction Poetry
A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we
witness the unfolding of grief. “In the night I brush / my
teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s
piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of
bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays
me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s
passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence
about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what
is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a
man, describing “her face / full of fire, then groaning your
face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air.”
Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title
sequence brings acceptance, asking “What good/are wishes if
they aren’t / used up?” while understanding “How to listen /
to what’s gone.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the
reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right
words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of
life’s mysteries.
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