At the White Window

by David Young

This new collection of poems, David Young's ninth, is centered in the place where he has lived for forty years -- Oberlin, Ohio -- but its reach is both wide and deep. It takes in myth, history, natural history, and imaginative constructs of many kinds; it confidently joins itself to the long tradition of poetry stretching back to bards and shamans. Quietly, vividly, persistently, Young lets language and ordinary experience lead him to new places and new insights. His formal range takes in the prose poem and the sonnet, the villanelle, and the free verse lyric, but his voice is distinctive and musical throughout. The book opens with an elegiac section, commemorating, among others, Young's mother and his friend the poet Miroslav Holub. It closes with a sequence of ten sonnets, "Cloudstown Lightfall", that features Oberlin in the way a village might be featured in a series of panels for a Chinese painted screen. These poems will delight readers who are encountering David Young for the first time and confirm the enthusiasm of those who have followed his work since 1969, when his first collection, Sweating Out the Winter, was selected by William Stafford, Isabella Gardner, and Stanley Kunitz for the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum.

Genres: Poetry

76 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

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.