Book of Hours Poems |
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Author:
| Young, Kevin |
ISBN: | 978-0-307-27224-9 |
Publication Date: | Mar 2014 |
Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | AUD $45.00 |
Book Description:
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A beautiful book of both grief and birth from the award-winning poet whose work thrills his audience with its immediate emotional impact and musical riffs. A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of the poet's father, we witness the unfolding of his grief. "In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor," he tells us, in one of the collection's piercing two-line poems. Young captures the strange silence of bereavement- "Not the storm/ but the calm/ that slays me." But the...
More DescriptionA beautiful book of both grief and birth from the award-winning poet whose work thrills his audience with its immediate emotional impact and musical riffs.
A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of the poet's father, we witness the unfolding of his grief. "In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor," he tells us, in one of the collection's piercing two-line poems. Young captures the strange silence of bereavement- "Not the storm/ but the calm/ that slays me." But the poet acknowledges, even celebrates, life's passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence describing 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 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."