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Kevin Young

Book of Hours: Poems Paperback – October 13, 2015

by Kevin Young (Author)

30 ratings

4.2 on Goodreads

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A decade after the sudden and tragic loss of his father, we witness the unfolding of grief. “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he tells us, in one of the collection’s piercing two-line poems. Capturing the strange silence of bereavement (“Not the storm / but the calm / that slays me”), Kevin Young acknowledges, even celebrates, life’s passages, his loss transformed and tempered in a sequence about the birth of his son: in “Crowning,” he delivers what is surely one of the most powerful birth poems written by a man, describing “her face / full of fire, then groaning your face / out like a flower, blood-bloom,/ crocused into air.” Ending this book of both birth and grief, the gorgeous title sequence brings acceptance, asking “What good/are wishes if they aren’t / used up?” while understanding “How to listen / to what’s gone.” Young’s frank music speaks directly to the reader in these elemental poems, reminding us that the right words can both comfort us and enlarge our understanding of life’s mysteries.

Print length

208 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Knopf
Publication date

October 13, 2015
Dimensions

6.03 x 0.58 x 8.97 inches
ISBN-10

0375711880
ISBN-13

978-0375711886
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"If you read no other book of poetry this year, this should be the one." —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"An impressively musical exploration of grief and endurance. . . . Young wrestles with loss and joy with enviable beauty and subtlety." —Publishers Weekly

"Young’s tone is always pitch-perfect in these poems." —Los Angeles Times

"In Young’s poems, loss is built into beauty, and while (for the most part) we take turns experiencing them, they never seem truly separate. As such, many of his poems are both sad and sweet, solemn and celebratory, reading like tender eulogies for whatever a father’s future can hold." —The Boston Globe

"I’ve read plenty of books about grief and about coming through grief in my life, but I’ve never before encountered a book that gets it as right as Kevin Young’s Book of Hours. It’s one of those rare reading experiences that I recognized, even as I read it, as a book I was going to buy over and over again, to give as a gift to friends who’ve had that certain hole cut out of them, the loss that you can recognize from a distance, even in the happiest of times." —The Stranger

About the Author

Kevin Young is the author of seven previous books of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, winner of a 2012 American Book Award, and Jelly Roll, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the editor of eight other collections, most recently The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink. Young’s book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and won a PEN Open Book Award. He is currently the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English, curator of Literary Collections and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Bereavement
Behind his house, my father’s dogs
sleep in kennels, beautiful,
he built just for them.

They do not bark.
Do they know he is dead?
They wag their tails

& head. They beg
& are fed.
Their grief is colossal

& forgetful.
Each day they wake
seeking his voice,

their names.
By dusk they seem
to unremember everything—

to them even hunger
is a game. For that, I envy.
For that, I cannot bear to watch them

pacing their cage. I try to remember
they love best confined space
to feel safe. Each day

a saint comes by to feed the pair
& I draw closer
the shades.

I’ve begun to think of them
as my father’s other sons,
as kin. Brothers-in-paw.

My eyes each day thaw.
One day the water cuts off.
Then back on.

They are outside dogs—
which is to say, healthy
& victorious, purposeful

& one giant muscle
like the heart. Dad taught
them not to bark, to point

out their prey. To stay.
Were they there that day?
They call me

like witnesses & will not say.
I ask for their care
& their carelessness—

wish of them forgiveness.
I must give them away.
I must find for them homes,

sleep restless in his.
All night I expect they pace
as I do, each dog like an eye

roaming with the dead
beneath an unlocked lid.

Memorial Day
Thunder knocks
loud on all the doors.

Lightning lets you
inside every house,
white flooding

the spare, spotless rooms.
Flags at half mast.

And like choirboys,
clockwork, the dogs
ladder their voices

to the dark, echoing off
each half-hid star.

Greening
It never ends, the bruise
of being—messy,
untimely, the breath

of newborns uneven, half
pant, as they find
their rhythm, inexact

as vengeance. Son,
while you sleep
we watch you like a kettle

learning to whistle.
Awake, older,
you fumble now

in the most graceful
way—grateful
to have seen you, on your own

steam, simply eating, slow,
chewing—this bloom
of being. Almost beautiful

how you flounder, mouth full, bite
the edges of this world
that doesn’t want

a thing but to keep turning
with, or without you—
with. With. Child, hold fast

I say, to this greening thing
as it erodes
and spins.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; Reprint edition (October 13, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375711880
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375711886
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.03 x 0.58 x 8.97 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #488,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #164 in Family Poetry (Books)
- #315 in Black & African American Poetry (Books)
- #936 in Love Poems

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30 ratings

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Kevin Young

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Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Dear Darkness, named one of the Best Books of 2008 by National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and winner of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Award in poetry. His book Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of four other volumes, including Blues Poems, Jazz Poems, and the Library of America’s John Berryman: Selected Poems. The curator of literary collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library and Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, Young lives in Boston and Atlanta.

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RM

Beautiful journey

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 15, 2021

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I was first riveted to Young's writing with Pieta through The Poetry Foundation. My own excellent father having just passed away the previous summer, how could I not be drawn into Young's empathetic expressions? Hungry for more, I decided to explore the full book and I was not disappointed. The mixture of brief and longer fragments of thought - organized into categories of mourning and awareness - helped flesh out my own grief. It was cathartic and soothing. I know first hand this pain Young describes and felt a kinship with the author over our shared emotions - though we ourselves and our parents are very different people. In his conclusion, Young does not jump to a hasty, summarized, nicely-wrapped-up answer to this gaping wound, but instead touches on the possibilities of a life to those of us left behind. Thank you - these words were so very much needed.

One person found this helpful

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Average Todd

simply excellent

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 12, 2018

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Kevin Young is a phenomenal poet, and this book winds deftly through the caverns of mourning, love, remembering, life, and loss. I lost my mother not too long ago, and the poems in this collection continual struck a chord within me. I see this as an essential collection, not just of Young's, but of contemporary poetry as well, and I know I will be returning to it again and again.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Terre

Gorgeous, gritty and gut-wrenching

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 30, 2014

Verified Purchase

I was interested in reading this after seeing a poem featured on one the literary emails I subscribe to... Yes, I bought the hardcover edition based upon the strength of ONE POEM. It was THAT good.
Well, thankfully, I was not disappointed in the entire tome. Young depicts life, beautiful, tragic, funny, sad, in all its awkwardness and ennui and beauty, and I relate, deeply.
Excellent work. I am a fan. And I will be collecting his other works, as long as he keeps writing.

3 people found this helpful

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CornfedHippo

Good gift or surprise for someone dealing with loss in their own lives... or even for yourself

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 22, 2014

Verified Purchase

I love the theme of this book and how it was written to help the author in the grieving of his father that had passed. I heard about it on NPR and the author read some of the poems. It sounded great on the radio, so I ended up buying it for my partner to help him cope with the loss of his own father. So far, he likes it and appreciates this kind of writing.

One person found this helpful

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SpeckledFreckle

Hit and miss

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 24, 2014

Verified Purchase

Heard Kevin Young interviewed on the radio and one poem in particular caught my attention, a poem about miscarriage/stillbirth. I scoured the internet and came across the book finally. I love the look and feel of the book itself, but the poems themselves left me wanting more. I should note that I am by no means a poetry buff, but I do love literature. I found many of the pieces too abstract to follow, and eventually spaced out while reading, and... nodded off. I will pick it up again in a different mood and see how I fare, but for now I'm not so in love with it.

5 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Book of Hours is Exceptional

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 13, 2016

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I absolutely enjoyed this book of poems by Kevin Young---powerful, moving, gripping, amazing, beautiful, and extraordinary! He is such a fantastic poet. You will definitely enjoy each poem in this book! I highly recommend it!!

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poignant

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 29, 2022

not quite a religious book, young’s Book of Hours is a meditation of the events before and after the death of his father. his keen precision does not falter as he goes on to share details of his companionship with the woman he will marry, their early married life, and the role of attendant to the stages of his wife’s pregnancy, each stage a poem clinically titled and told with such explicit care and love, one sighs in awe. present is the solace of a loved one and the tradition of Book of Hours of rilke and merton.

young, as poet, has a flair for the trivial day by day events, some of them seem a letdown coming after the strong previous poems. and then there are poems like Ruth in the section of the book entitled Body, which accurately catches in poetic form how it feels to be bedridden with a stubborn cold. a word on form. young favors a slender line of stanzas, usually tercets, three or four words per stanza, stanzas trimmed of fat.

It never ends, the bruise
of being—messy,
untimely, the breath

of newborns uneven, half
pant, as they find
their rhythm inexact

as vengeance.

the poems in the final section, Book of Hours, named after the book’s title, shows influences of emily dickinson and denise levertov, a poet with whom young studied. good poems, but dickinson spent a long solitary poet’s life crafting a peculiar vision which she never abandoned, something she did without publication or the support of a poetry community. with young i’m reminded of the tourists in colorful shirts in his poem The City of God, a well prepared tourist who’s studied up on the places he plans to visit but lacking the commitment to relocate and drop roots, an observation which applies to any poet influenced by dickinson working in the public sphere. not that dickinson wanted to work to isolation and few poets have that luxury for that high level of devotion to a calling. still, what young learned from dickinson, levertov, and numerous other poets before him, he’s mastered and found his way into what they call the literary canon.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 10, 2018

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Beautiful truth expressed in these verses

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