Customer Reviews

The Day Underneath the Day

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Yes, C. Dale Young has written a gorgeous first collection, but beauty--of landscape, of the love between men, of art--is never for its own sake, and never at the disservice of truth. For underneath all of the fine details are concerns of exile and empire in his Caribbean poems (one in particular, "On Privilege," belongs in all of the anthologies); and the impermanence of art and love. This is a bold, polished, and often tender (see "Broughtonia") first book, filled with rich, complicated poems that repay rereading. Do not miss this book.

There seems to have been a good number of first collections of poetry published this year, and the generation of poets coming into being is certainly a strong one. Young, in particular, is a traditionalist in terms of approach, but these poems are by no means old-fashioned. They are concerned with family relationships (between child and parent; between men; between friends, etc.), the difficulty of making art true, and the colonial experiment in the Caribbean. I agree with many who have already pointed out his command of visual particulars. More than many in his generation, Young seems to almost paint with words and relies on the images he generates to make his arguments. It isn't that he is less concerned with language but that he uses language to make his points via image. A very beautiful book anyone interested in poetry should read.

A friend of mine bought this book at a reading in San Francisco a little while ago and recommended it to me. It is a beautiful book and, as others have mentioned here, the lushness of imagery is impressive. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who regularly reads poetry.

Some nice images here, but little else. Many of the poems in this book are sterile and dull. This is the type of poetry that convinces people that Poetry is academic and boring. Young clearly had too much fun with histories, dictionaries, and a thesaurus.

I have been reading C. Dale Young's poems in literary magazines for several years now, and I have always been struck by the powerful command he has over the visual. This realization has been amplified for me after reading his collection. Young has one of the most incredible gifts for seeing the particulars around us. And his language is rich, but only in service to what he sees. If you are looking for beautiful, graceful poems that move beyond the person out into the terrain, then you need to buy this book. Young is one of our best younger poets.

I have to say that this is the one truly bad book of poems I've read in the past year. Not mediocre, not disappointing, but actively bad; a lyricism lapsing everywhere into the sentimental, trite emotion (and emotionalism), formal sloppiness and an absolute lack of originality. Most of these poems--and the images they contain--look like first drafts, the first things that would occur to a not-especially talented MFA student, and all travel ground that at this point in the history of American poetry has been traveled a million times already.

To me, this is a fairly obvious example of someone parlaying editorship of a well-known magazine into book publication. That it got published is in itself astounding, and that it's praised (even compared to Wallace Stevens's Harmonium) is a sad commentary on our poetic culture.

People here have already mentioned the visual nature of Young's poetry, but his work is much more complex than that. He is as much a master of mood and tone as he is of the visual. The third section of this book, which deals with the Caribbean and its history, is one of the most incredible mix of poems I have seen in years. These are among the best poems I have seen in magazines in the past few years and, when taken altogether, are simply amazing. This may be a first book, but these poems don't seem like poems you find in a first book at all. The confidence displayed in this collection is the confidence one earns after years and years of writing. This is definitely a poet to watch in the future.

I am not sure why Young is frequently referred to as a formal poet. He rarely writes in meter and rhyme. One of the best poems in this book, "Cancer and Complaint at Midsummer," is rhymed and metrical. One wonders if he wrote more poems in meter and rhyme if maybe this would be a better book. I read this book on the recommendation of several friends, each of whom lauded Young's poetry. I now question their judgements. Young clearly knows how to write verse, but these poems are so boring. I wish to God he would simply come out and write what he wants to write instead of always hiding behind landscapes. Yes, the poems are visual, but this reader (and many others) wants more than exacting vision. Young may develop into one of our leading poets, but this work only hints that something better may come. As it stands, this is a dry, unforgiving book.

I am late coming to this book, but recently a friend of mine heard Young read at a writer's conference and recommended I check it out. It is a beautiful book. As a poet myself trying to get a book published, reading this book made me realize that the bar can be quite high. What I admired most in these poems is the quiet and restrained voice. It is that "voice" that allows Young to make bold assertions, not just of vision, but of feeling. Young does sometimes skirt the sentimental, but I don't believe he ever crosses the line into sentimentality. There is always just enough self-doubt and self-loathing, if you can call it that, that saves these poems from sentimentality. In arguably one of his best poems, "On Privilege," he gives us a scene of incredible splendor. It is unfair to compare him to Derek Walcott, but we have few others who have written about the Caribbean. "On Privilege" is filled with the kind of breath-taking detail we know from Walcott's work, but this poem also holds a disturbing relationship between the speaker and his family, between the speaker and the very scene he describes.

The closing section of the book is by far the most formidable section of the book. It is filled with the tensions of artistry vs. history, a colonial history of oppression and destruction. But many of the themes in this section start in the preceding two sections of the book: the inability to love; the inability to trust the world and what it gives; the precise vision that sees more than what is usually seen by the ordinary eye. This book isn't for everyone who likes and reads poetry. In the end, Young is a poet's poet. And this poet is grateful he found time to write this book.

Every so often, a poetry collection is published that signals the arrival of a powerful new voice in our Literature that we simply cannot ignore. This happens infrequently, but this is one of those collections. It is no wonder there is some jealousy shown here in some of the reviews. I have seen poems by Young off and on in literary magazines for many years. Each time, I have been impressed with the individual poems. Collected here, they are even more impressive. The accuracy of image, and the extraordinary way Young creates mood and feeling using image, is truly a gift. The third section of this book, which deals with the Caribbean, is absolutely beautiful. Complicated with the concerns of Colonialism and the complex relationship one has with both the worlds of the dominator and the dominated, it is a poetry of deep political and emotional interest. Like Derek Walcott, Young sees the beauty of so many cultures intermingled in this region of the world but refrains from placing one culture above another. This is a book everyone interested in poetry should read. In a hundred years, it may well be regarded the way we regard Wallace Steven's HARMONIUM. Like HARMONIUM, this book signals a poet of extraordinary ability has landed among us.