Field of light and shadow

"Young is one of the leading literary lights of his generation ... His is preeminently a poetry of place. For decades now, he has told this story with deep beauty and grace ... His strengths are the marvelous tensility and acrobatic hijinks of language, the deep emotional pull and breath of family and loved ones that moves just under the skin of all these poems, the seemingly effortless invention in the imaginary."--Charles Wright. "In [Black Lab], Young's tenth [book], he's clearly at the top of his game."--The Plain Dealer (Cleveland). "Convincing proof that Young ... is one of our best poets ... There are poems [in The Planet on the Desk] that serve to distill the essence of the times in which they were written."--The Wallace Stevens Journal. "[Young is] the ordinary citizen, though happier than most, who is alert to the contemporary world of war, revolution, and great men that impinge on his personal experience of family love and attachment ... [His] poems ... give us the pleasure of inhabiting a richly meaningful world."--The New York Times Book Review. "Young engages the demands of language and imagination with humility, humor, and extraordinary verbal resourcefulness ... One of our finest poets."--Virginia Quarterly Review. "David Young's exploration of language is ... compelling and inspiring ... His relation to his art is exhilarating ... One can only admire the way he controls language even while clearly conscious that language controls him."--Poetry. A career-spanning volume from one of our most valuable living American poets, offering poems that display an exquisite ear tuned to the natural world, to love and friendship, and to the continually renewable possibilities of language. David Young's settings are at once local and universalùan adolescence in Omaha, late summer on Lake Erie, a sleepless night in the backyard during a meteor shower. He moves with dazzling ease between culture and nature, between the literary and the philosophical, microcosm and macrocosm. Here are poems on Osip Mandelstam and Chairman Mao, the meaning of boxcars on the track, the beautiful names of the months, and a fox at the field's edge, charged in each case by Young's fierce intelligence and candor in the face of grief and loss. "We float through space. Days pass," Young writes in "The Portable Earth-Lamp." "Sometimes we know we are part of a crystal / where light is sorted and stored." His metaphysical reach, balancing remarkable humility with penetrating vision, is one of the great gifts of this exemplary career in poetry. --Book Jacket.