Work Lights

by David Young

David Young is the author of several collections of poetry, including Field of Light and Shadow(Knopf, 2010); Black Lab (2006); At the White Window (2000); Night Thoughts and Henry Vaughan(1994), which won the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry; The Planet on the Desk: Selected and New Poems 1960-1990 (1991); Foraging (1986); Earthshine (1988); The Names of a Hare in English (1979); Work Lights: Thirty-Two Prose Poems (1977); and Boxcars (1972).

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

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.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Work Lights is a collection of thirty-two prose poems, presented in the following order...

The Poem Against the Horizon
Sexual Groans
Four About Reflecting Surfaces
Four About the Letter P
Four About Heavy Machinery
Four About Metaphysics
Four About Death
Four About Apples
Four About Mummies
The Poem of the Cold
Kohoutek

The Poem Against the Horizon (pg. 1)...

In a dim room above the freightyards, next to an old brass bed, an angel is taking off his wings. He winces a little as he eases the straps that run down his chest: the beat of the wings is the beat of the heart.
Out of harness, the heart rolls over now. Panting like a wrestler. Such love, such roaring! Spokane and back. So good to come down, home to this room with the stained lace curtains and the sound of switch engines. So good to remove the wings, the love, the yoke the blood must wear as it paces, oxlike, the circle of its day . . .
He sleeps on his side in the overalls he was too tired to take off. Outside the window, rain runs and drips from the eaves. Overhead, the wind and the black sky belong to someone else.

from Four About Reflecting Surfaces (pg. 7)...

I looked in the fields. Saw sheep, saw furrows. Saw leaves and needles, saw standing, leaning and fallen trees. Looked in the pond by the beaver dam. Saw a cloud and a trout and a swallow and a bone and a twig and a moon. And a face that was not my own.

from Four About the Letter P (pg. 12)...

Hauling a cake of ice from the ice-house, hosing off the sawdust, shaving it to slush that is packed around the can and dasher and sprinkled with rock salt, taking turns with the crank, doing this every Sunday morning through a whole summer so that some hundred people may have ice-cream with chokecherry sauce, and never once thinking "This is a piece of the river."

from Four About Heavy Machinery (pg. 17)...

Cranes are not to be compared with trees, not with their almost Scandinavian sense of the importance of duty and power. Sometimes the face is very far from the heart, and the one thing you would like to do - lie down next to that beautiful passing stranger, for instance - is the thing that seems least possible. So you sway against the gray sky, pretending to a stiffness you do not feel. The building you helped create rises toward you, filled with the sounds of hammering and the strange shine of worklights.

from Four About Metaphysics (pg. 23)...

A glass of water and an onion for his supper, the Spanish visionary sat at his table in the future. Ultimate secrets were streaming from the monastery. A rowboat was crossing the very blurred lake. Sex, for him, was just an impolite kind of staring. But the blue-eyed countess did not seem to mind. Millions of things sought to claim his attention, and he tried to look beyond them. Remembering this sentence: "The sea is as deepe in a calme as in a storme."

from Four About Death (pg. 28)...

Naturally, no one has been more misrepresented. The large dark eyes, for instance, with their penetrating glance. In fact, they are blind. But if you put your own up close to them, you begin to glimpse the many things within: the lovers in their squirrel cage, the panel discussion, the feast of the green-gowned goats, the bull's eye lanterns strung through coastal villages. "So that is the sort of thing," you muse, "that lies beyond." The answer to that: not necessarily.

from Four About Apples (pg. 34)...

As I raised it for the second bite, I saw a tiny man, waving his arms and cursing in French. A surrealist. I looked away in embarrassment. How could I explain to him that he had mistaken my apple for a pomme? You know how touchy these "little masters" can be. Not to mention the language barrier, which is eight feet, three and a half inches. "Odeur misérable de pourri!" he screamed. "Sot fesse, espèce de con!" When you need an interpreter for your apple, things have come to a pretty pass. I put it down and went to the movies.

from Four About Mummies (pg. 41)...

In the doctor's office there is a chart of the circulatory system. A blue and red thicket grows, but the figure it inhabits is otherwise white and blank; and the hands are spread, as if imploring. But communication is next to impossible. It is said that they have their own language, a compound of muffled odors in which they converse like birds. If you were patient and had a keen enough nose, a dark pyramid would be filled with a melancholy, spicy twittering.

The Poem of the Cold (pg. 44)...

Admit you tried to make it pretty. Start again. Talk about the huge nails going in, the serene blows of the hammer. Flocks migrate at great cost, animals crawl painfully into burrows. A starving man chews on a bird's nest, cursing. It may be true that wonderful things go on - a polished haw swinging on a tree in the oxlike wind, an old woman splitting wood next to a sand-coloured barn - but you must avoid these. For you are the cold's thin voice, that thickens everything else. As you sing, warm things ball up, shrivel, stiffen. Hands become mittens, heads become hoods. Shadows lose their outlines, gates lock, waterfalls hang silent as their own bad portraits. And gradually, as you shiver and wince, your poem will grind to its own slow close, like the works of a twenty-five pound clock, freezing beside the overturned face froze around his tears and beard, the five dead huskies.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witty, sharp and strange in just the right way.