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Beloved Infidel
After more than 12 years, Dean Young's second book of poetry, Beloved Infidel, is back in print.
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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48 people want to read
About the author
Dean Young
46 books106 followersDean Young is the author of many collections of poetry, including Shock by Shock, Bender: New and Selected Poems, and Elegy on a Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 18, 2013
Young’s amazing disconnections never fail to stun me with their perfection. He’s one of my favorite contemporary poets
May 17, 2013
Favorite lines:
They sat not looking at each other
Already trees losing leaves 4
Like the moment in a dance you let your partner go
And suddenly she’s loose fire and unapproachable 5
Flames rush in smudges like lovers who must pass through each other as punishment for too much lust and feeding 5
Birds, of all they’ve come to mean of loss, their pink retreating feet 6
My heart like a revolving tray of sweets 7
How many times do you have to die before your dead? 8
Sometimes I feel a part of me roam off, as in grief 9
The Greek dead know everything but without any sense of order, it’s all already over 11 (pre-destined to fail?)
We bat back and forth, trying to figure out what happened to us
Weeping and swallowing our weeping
Barely visible even to each other (grief blinds)
Tears,…as the souls making their rough crossing (making the in tangible tangible, the invisible sadness visible) 13
Watching her in bed the languorous inhale and sudden stabbing out love like smoke 18
It could just be an emptiness to carry like a picture of a childhood pet. 24
The sea spumes and knocks them joyously down and swallows. 25
I hate that we lose so much. Not just each other but of ourselves 29
Two socks, one mine, one yours, we find them under a pillow, nestled together like newts in love (37) (every day commonplace of love)
I love the sea, how it crosses every thing out.
You know how you feel when you watch someone cry. I mean really cry, dredging something from so deep our geographical theories must be revised 39
We want what everyone wants, complete devotion and to be left the hell alone 40
How carefully impossible to replace the figurines with always chipped off feet no how swaddled in newspaper 43
These moments seem simultaneously extinguished like torches plunged in waves 45 (impermanence of things)
Everything seemed fraught with its own diminishment and desertion, rainbowed: it’s raining and the sun is out.
Some things we love for their difficulty 46
Hostile to whatever it is we work so hard to give and take from and to each other (sex) 51
What I don’t understand is the beauty. 55
All of us beguiled, chagrined, nearly sick with rich disclosure (how he sums up his poems with universality, inclusion)
When does a jump become a fall? (suicide) 57
Good bye goodbye I almost waved, chilled by fast evaporation 59 (breakup, sudden death)
Can anyone actually choose a moment to die, choose to die at all, and what is a moment anyway but a thing made entirely of its own vanishing 60 (free will to die, or pre-destined? Time as ephemeral, not lasting, itself an oxymoron)
everyone remembers crumbling that first nest when even the fallen chicks, bald, brainless, crepuscular, even death didn’t phase us (on naïve, first time relationships, innocent) 63
it’s carrying something, a cup too full, a phone number, a thought like a letter torn then taped together again (failed marriage) 63
the blue throttle of receding, the red hurtling forth 64
They sat not looking at each other
Already trees losing leaves 4
Like the moment in a dance you let your partner go
And suddenly she’s loose fire and unapproachable 5
Flames rush in smudges like lovers who must pass through each other as punishment for too much lust and feeding 5
Birds, of all they’ve come to mean of loss, their pink retreating feet 6
My heart like a revolving tray of sweets 7
How many times do you have to die before your dead? 8
Sometimes I feel a part of me roam off, as in grief 9
The Greek dead know everything but without any sense of order, it’s all already over 11 (pre-destined to fail?)
We bat back and forth, trying to figure out what happened to us
Weeping and swallowing our weeping
Barely visible even to each other (grief blinds)
Tears,…as the souls making their rough crossing (making the in tangible tangible, the invisible sadness visible) 13
Watching her in bed the languorous inhale and sudden stabbing out love like smoke 18
It could just be an emptiness to carry like a picture of a childhood pet. 24
The sea spumes and knocks them joyously down and swallows. 25
I hate that we lose so much. Not just each other but of ourselves 29
Two socks, one mine, one yours, we find them under a pillow, nestled together like newts in love (37) (every day commonplace of love)
I love the sea, how it crosses every thing out.
You know how you feel when you watch someone cry. I mean really cry, dredging something from so deep our geographical theories must be revised 39
We want what everyone wants, complete devotion and to be left the hell alone 40
How carefully impossible to replace the figurines with always chipped off feet no how swaddled in newspaper 43
These moments seem simultaneously extinguished like torches plunged in waves 45 (impermanence of things)
Everything seemed fraught with its own diminishment and desertion, rainbowed: it’s raining and the sun is out.
Some things we love for their difficulty 46
Hostile to whatever it is we work so hard to give and take from and to each other (sex) 51
What I don’t understand is the beauty. 55
All of us beguiled, chagrined, nearly sick with rich disclosure (how he sums up his poems with universality, inclusion)
When does a jump become a fall? (suicide) 57
Good bye goodbye I almost waved, chilled by fast evaporation 59 (breakup, sudden death)
Can anyone actually choose a moment to die, choose to die at all, and what is a moment anyway but a thing made entirely of its own vanishing 60 (free will to die, or pre-destined? Time as ephemeral, not lasting, itself an oxymoron)
everyone remembers crumbling that first nest when even the fallen chicks, bald, brainless, crepuscular, even death didn’t phase us (on naïve, first time relationships, innocent) 63
it’s carrying something, a cup too full, a phone number, a thought like a letter torn then taped together again (failed marriage) 63
the blue throttle of receding, the red hurtling forth 64
April 9, 2008
And again: kicks ass
Read
January 22, 2012In "The Hive," as in many other of the very fine poems in Dean Young's second collection, BELOVED INFIDEL, the slightly cracked and wavy but nonetheless serviceable mirror of contemporary language is held up to our lives, to the thrusts and parries that characterize what is perhaps our age's central obsession: relationships. "None of us are to blame," Young writes, "sitting on the porch, smoking, quitting smoking, / talking about our backs, Italy, finishing / the book on Gertrude Stein, betrayals, talking / about shoes and how we want what everyone wants: / complete devotion and to be left the hell alone." Young's gift for the universal and seemingly irrefutable statement is also felt, as the title perhaps indicates, in "On Being Asked by a Student If He Should Ask Out Some Girl," another of the volume's brightest stars.
The quirky, conversational, self-mocking, and achingly human voice here is well-modulated through the book's four sections. Young plummets into undeniable despair -- though always with a kind of stoic humor -- in poems like "Shades," where a friend tells him of his lover's suicide. "What can I say," Young asks himself, "that isn't a contrivance of keening and / projection? How twice a woman I once loved / told me gently, almost politely, / sometimes she wishes me dead?" Yet the same section includes a poem Young is able to title, with a straight face, "Pleasure"; he argues for its place in lives carried out in the country that invented the Protestant ethic, its workaholics now laboring in the post-yuppie era. Young's argument is put forth for an entirely unfrivolous reason, one carrying the weight of a moral imperative: "There must be an aesthetic not based on death." In these funny, poignant, spikily intelligent, and unnervingly wise poems, Young makes a real winner of a case for this credo. And in the process, makes a book that's a winner of hearts as well. Call it, as he does in one of the superb volumes that Graywolf is now publishing, THE ART OF RECKLESSNESS.
(adapted from original review published in PLOUGHSHARES)
The quirky, conversational, self-mocking, and achingly human voice here is well-modulated through the book's four sections. Young plummets into undeniable despair -- though always with a kind of stoic humor -- in poems like "Shades," where a friend tells him of his lover's suicide. "What can I say," Young asks himself, "that isn't a contrivance of keening and / projection? How twice a woman I once loved / told me gently, almost politely, / sometimes she wishes me dead?" Yet the same section includes a poem Young is able to title, with a straight face, "Pleasure"; he argues for its place in lives carried out in the country that invented the Protestant ethic, its workaholics now laboring in the post-yuppie era. Young's argument is put forth for an entirely unfrivolous reason, one carrying the weight of a moral imperative: "There must be an aesthetic not based on death." In these funny, poignant, spikily intelligent, and unnervingly wise poems, Young makes a real winner of a case for this credo. And in the process, makes a book that's a winner of hearts as well. Call it, as he does in one of the superb volumes that Graywolf is now publishing, THE ART OF RECKLESSNESS.
(adapted from original review published in PLOUGHSHARES)
March 3, 2009
Found this years ago in a remainder pile at a retail bookstore. I'd been seeking it out because I'd been given a copy of a poem in it called "Storms" (this was at the IU Writers' Conference c. 1999). Dean Young has somewhat disappointed me as the years go by -- he over-produces, and is often too jokey...something of the wonderful balance he has in this book has been lost. Sometimes even at his best he tends to go on too long. But here is what I consider a really good bit from "Storms":
Excerpt From “Storms” (page 60)
Other nights she’d be waiting,
wetting herself with her hand and rapidly
we’d fuck, panting like harnessed dogs
who didn’t know miles ago their master
had frozen in the sled. Stop? No one
can stop. It starts out Wednesday then
it’s Tuesday and you’re sitting with A
in a café under some ornamental masks.
She’s disturbed. You’re disturbed.
A whole cloudburst of disturbance.
Inside the purple mask, there’s more feathers,
each with a quill directed inward, against
the face. Awful to be in it as well as
outside of it, hooting with fear. Will A
stay with B and is B’s cancer-ruddled mother
choosing this moment to die, can anyone
actually choose a moment to die, choose
to die at all and what is a moment anyway
but a thing made entirely of its own vanishing?
It all get so complex fast. You’re just
sitting there, nodding, then BOOM, the temple’s
in ruins and the emperor has you up at dawn
beating the ocean with chains. I wonder
if C will ever forgive me and will D ever
pick up his phone….
Excerpt From “Storms” (page 60)
Other nights she’d be waiting,
wetting herself with her hand and rapidly
we’d fuck, panting like harnessed dogs
who didn’t know miles ago their master
had frozen in the sled. Stop? No one
can stop. It starts out Wednesday then
it’s Tuesday and you’re sitting with A
in a café under some ornamental masks.
She’s disturbed. You’re disturbed.
A whole cloudburst of disturbance.
Inside the purple mask, there’s more feathers,
each with a quill directed inward, against
the face. Awful to be in it as well as
outside of it, hooting with fear. Will A
stay with B and is B’s cancer-ruddled mother
choosing this moment to die, can anyone
actually choose a moment to die, choose
to die at all and what is a moment anyway
but a thing made entirely of its own vanishing?
It all get so complex fast. You’re just
sitting there, nodding, then BOOM, the temple’s
in ruins and the emperor has you up at dawn
beating the ocean with chains. I wonder
if C will ever forgive me and will D ever
pick up his phone….
December 21, 2008
"My heart hurts like a revolving tray of sweets."
January 6, 2009
You've got to imagine faith can be caught,
kept living like a thing in a jar,
breath-holes punched in the lid,
a little torn grass in the bottom.
-Dean Young, "Legend"
kept living like a thing in a jar,
breath-holes punched in the lid,
a little torn grass in the bottom.
-Dean Young, "Legend"
February 24, 2009
I love a lot of the detail work in this and the pacing of the line.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews