Pacific Light

by David Mason

David Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow , as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet “at the height of his powers.”

96 pages, Paperback

Published August 23, 2022

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Reviews

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

"No gesture I can make will budge the earth,
no rage for justice, no love or fever of grief
will leave so much as a wren's weight remaining."

So writes David Mason in the poem "A Wren's Weight." But for me, I find the heft and impact of David's poetry to be considerably heavier than that.

Mason is a gentle craftsman of received poetic forms (like the villanelle) and is a particular master of poems focused on the geography of place. He is also widely regarded as one of the best narrative poets writing in English today. Pacific Light is a tightly focused exploration of a "late career" poet who retired from his job teaching English in Colorado Springs and moved with his wife to Tasmania. And so, the Pacific ocean is a central character in this book, but by no means the only one. Mason reflects broadly on the condition of being an immigrant in a new land, of leaving behind many books gathered during a lifetime of reading and being in academia, of memories of snow, and of course...the importance of love and paying attention to the natural world around us.

Of the many fine poems included in this collection, "The Garden and The Library" seems destined to me to become anthologized in future poetry collections. If one has never encountered this former Poet Laureate of Colorado before, I would suggest beginning with his book Sea-Salt: Poems of a Decade, followed by Ludlow, and THEN this collection. Such an order of reading will, I think, give one an even greater appreciation of what David has done here at this point in his writing vocation. In conclusion: highly recommended. 4.5 stars.