At the White Window

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.

David Young is Longman Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oberlin College.