Earthshine

by David Young

Earthshine is a book about a wife's illness and death from cancer and the aftermath of grief. It is, necessarily, painful. Yet David Young, is meditating on despair and the loss of love, has found the "day coming up again, the world enacting its own beginnings and everything moving in this earthshine." The clouds and mountains still glisten. The earth is "a crystal where light is sorted and stored," a "tiny beacon in the hurting dark."

But before new light is the dark, and David Young leads the way through the dark carefully, gently, in restrained yet penetrating words, from the shock of discovery ("the first death") to surgery, liver scans, the rude details of disease, the tightening circle of pain, the dwindling body, the spreading sorrow. Then, the search for light--at first there comes "an afterglow of love," then misery starts "to slip away" and a sky displays a blue radiance. "The tears that filled me up fill with light now."

71 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1988

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

David Pollock Young was an American poet, translator, editor, literary critic and professor. His work includes 11 volumes of poetry, translations from Italian, Chinese, German, Czech, Dutch, and Spanish, critical work on Shakespeare, Yeats, and modernist poets, and landmark anthologies of prose poetry and magical realism. He co-founded and edited the magazine FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics for its 50 years of publication. Young was Longman Professor Emeritus of English at Oberlin College, and was the recipient of awards including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.