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To Know the Way Back
The possessive magic of grief always has a danger of consuming us when it fully embraces us, but when we fully embrace it like Howard Young does in To Know the Way Back, we can see grief’s power of recollection and transformation. As an Anglophile, I was intrigued by Young’s exploration and characterization of modern England as a grief text. In his hands it is something very contemporary, yet the past is always at the ready as he moves us through his experiences. — Sean Felix, author of Did You Even Know I Was Here?There are ideas in Buddhism that the phenomena we see, and that which underlies it (unseen but still in existence) are the same thing. We can perceive the toaster is hot, but not the electricity that is heating it, yet they are both there. So, the blossom and all that feeds and creates it are the same thing. The Dragonfly and its prey are not subject and object, but one. For Howard Young, poetry seems the ideal way to investigate this, for the poem and the idea are inseparable. In this lies the truth. The blossom is always there, waiting. It will appear to come and go, but life and death can be smoke and mirrors, we know this every spring and every autumn. As Persephone must rise from the underworld, so she will always have to return. The wheel is always in spin.
Not every poem in this collection directly embodies these ideas, but this concept has often been in the back of Young's mind while writing them. He likes to think that no matter how straightforward the poems may sometimes appear, they do have some additional layers of meaning for the reader to discover, if they want to. It is, after all, the viewer who completes the work of art.
Howard Young is a poet and artist from East Sussex, who lives in a small house near the sea with his wife, children and too many typewriters. He loves walking, art, poetry, films, music, novels, the sea, Ancient Greece, existentialism, our old apple tree, the countryside and cricket.
Not every poem in this collection directly embodies these ideas, but this concept has often been in the back of Young's mind while writing them. He likes to think that no matter how straightforward the poems may sometimes appear, they do have some additional layers of meaning for the reader to discover, if they want to. It is, after all, the viewer who completes the work of art.
Howard Young is a poet and artist from East Sussex, who lives in a small house near the sea with his wife, children and too many typewriters. He loves walking, art, poetry, films, music, novels, the sea, Ancient Greece, existentialism, our old apple tree, the countryside and cricket.
83 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 19, 2022
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