Field of Light and Shadow: Selected and New Poems

by David Young

A career-spanning volume from one of our most valuable living American poets, offering poems that display an exquisite ear tuned to the natural world, to love and friendship, and to the continually renewable possibilities of language. David Young’s settings are at once local and universal—an adolescence in Omaha, late summer on Lake Erie, a sleepless night in the backyard during a meteor shower. He moves with dazzling ease between culture and nature, between the literary and the philosophical, microcosm and macrocosm. Here are poems on Osip Mandelstam and Chairman Mao, the meaning of boxcars on the track, the beautiful names of the months, and a fox at the field’s edge, charged in each case by Young’s fierce intelligence and candor in the face of grief and loss.

“We float through space. Days pass,” Young writes in “The Portable Earth-Lamp.” “Sometimes we know we are part of a crystal / where light is sorted and stored.” His metaphysical reach, balancing remarkable humility with penetrating vision, is one of the great gifts of this exemplary career in poetry.

Genres: Poetry

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 7, 2010

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

[Becca · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quintessentially American collection of rich, lyrical poetry that reminds us why it's amazing to be alive. Young's celebration of the minutiae that composes our realities—especially the details we so often miss—is refreshing and unexpected. For anyone who loves language and its potential to capture the realities of the everyday.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

In these poems, from each of the books David Young has publishd and including some newer ones reflect such a sense of place. You can smell it, live in the light until it feels familiar to you where ever you actually happen to be sitting as you read. Many poems reference his bond with his first wife, her illness and his time after she died. They break your heart. The language is simple, for me, quietly surprising and I loved it.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I think I like best about David Young's poems is that they carry in their western forms the alertness of the haiku and the same sensibilities of nature. Even to read one of his long poems is to be rocked by the epiphanies moving steadily outward from the still point of the central idea. This is apparent in this fine selection of his poems from 10 previous volumes. Whether in sonnet or ghazal or couplet, the same breathtaking awareness of the natural world is always present. He can be deeply philosophical, as in the long sequence "Nine Deaths," and I lean into the philosophical to hear and learn. But I admire more how he strongly evokes nature, how he can picture a man standing in starshine or the strong wingbeat of a magpie or describe how the night is filled with owls. He appreciates where he stands in the world and allows the reader to stand with him.

[Abbie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kind of poetry collection that reminds people why they get into the genre in the first place. Young's series of poems about his wife's experience with cancer particularly moved me. He has a clear respect for the nature that surrounds him and the beauty in the world, which is something that people often overlook due to the pace of society. In three words, this collection is grounding, reverent, and thoughtful.

[Drea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous - this collection keeps giving. I carried it with me in the car and enjoyed each contemplative, interesting, complex, lovely one. Passing this to my kiddo because everyone should have beautiful poetry and prose at the ready in life.

[Mae · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you aaknopf and penguin random house for sending me this physical arc to read and review. I enjoyed the writing style and the poems overall. Some of the poems I didn't connect with. I enjoyed a lot of the poems however, especially the ones about nature. He describes the Midwest land beautifully. I like how he writes about his friends, wife, and life. If you enjoy poetry, give this a try.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Field of Light and Shadow is lovely book of poems written by David Young. Thank you to the publisher, for the gifted copy!

I’ve been reading a few poems from the book here and there over the past few months and found many to be quite delightful.

My favorite poems included:
- Quantum Haiku
- Herman Melville Feeding His Chicken
- Basho
- Sally and the Sun
- Segal
- A Calendar: The Beautiful Names of the Months
- A Lowercase Alphabet
- not quiet as in quiet but