{"product_id":"field-of-light-and-shadow-isbn-9781524712334","title":"Field of Light and Shadow","description":"\u003cb\u003eA gorgeous selection of the humane and moving poetry of David Young, a celebrated poet of the midwestern landscape and the people who live in it, with an expanded section featuring sixteen new poems exclusive to the paperback edition.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA newly expanded 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, and new poems that reflect a continued artistic interest in these subjects. 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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.DAVID YOUNG is the author of eleven books of poetry, including \u003ci\u003eField of Light and Shadow\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBlack Lab\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eAt the White Window\u003c\/i\u003e. He is a well-known translator of the Chinese poets and of the poems of Petrarch. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships as well as a Pushcart Prize, he is the Longman Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Oberlin College and the editor of the Field Poetry Series at Oberlin College Press.\u003cb\u003eThree Time-Trips\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1.\u003cbr\u003eMy shoes crush acorns.\u003cbr\u003eI’m thirty-nine I’m seven.\u003cbr\u003eFar down the yard\u003cbr\u003emy father and a neighbor\u003cbr\u003esail horseshoes through the air.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe clank and settle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd the past I thought would dwindle\u003cbr\u003earcs back to me, a hoop.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe men wipe their necks,\u003cbr\u003ethe boy walks round the oak:\u003cbr\u003esometimes our lives rust gently,\u003cbr\u003ea long-handled shovel, leaned\u003cbr\u003eagainst a sun-warmed wall.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e2.\u003cbr\u003eFourteen, I perch on the wicker seat\u003cbr\u003ein a nimbus of misery, love’s shrimp,\u003cbr\u003ehearing the streetcar’s crackle and hiss\u003cbr\u003eas the drugstore turns on its corner.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd what was real? The whipped sparks,\u003cbr\u003ethe glove puppets, bobbing, the pocket dreams,\u003cbr\u003ethis poem-to-be,my father’s wharf\u003cbr\u003eof set belief, the wicker and shellac?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLearning to be imperfect—\u003cbr\u003ethat’s erudition!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike coolies in flooded fields,\u003cbr\u003ewe wade on our own reflections.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e3.\u003cbr\u003eNovember bleach and brownout. Acid sky,\u003cbr\u003efalsetto sunlight, wire and fluff of weeds, pods,\u003cbr\u003ebone and paper grass-clumps. The dog bounds off,\u003cbr\u003estitching the field with her nose. Hound city.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt’s thirteen years. Different dog, same field,\u003cbr\u003eand double grief: dull for the slumped president,\u003cbr\u003estake-sharp for my friend’s ripped heart—faint\u003cbr\u003enight-cries in the mansions where we lived.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the bullet grooves are gone, the first dog’s dead,\u003cbr\u003eand here is the field, seedy and full of sameness.\u003cbr\u003eSpeech fails, years wrinkle. Dream covers dream\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethat covered dream. My head starts up a jazz\u003cbr\u003eI never could concoct. I have to grin. On the cold pond\u003cbr\u003ethe tinsmith wind is whistling at his work.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Portable Earth-Lamp\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe planet on the desk, illuminated globe\u003cbr\u003ewe ordered for Bo’s birthday,\u003cbr\u003esits in its Lucite crescent, a medicine ball\u003cbr\u003eof Rand McNally plastic. A brown cord\u003cbr\u003eruns from the South Pole toward a socket.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt’s mostly a night-light for the boys,\u003cbr\u003eand it blanches their dreaming faces,\u003cbr\u003ea blue sphere patched with continents,\u003cbr\u003emottled by deeps and patterned currents,\u003cbr\u003eits capital cities bright white dots.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur models: they’re touching and absurd,\u003cbr\u003emagical both for their truth and falsehood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI like its shine at night. Moth-light.\u003cbr\u003eI sleepwalk toward it, musing.\u003cbr\u003eThis globe’s a bible, a bubble of mythlight,\u003cbr\u003ea blue eye, a double\u003cbr\u003ebowl: empty of all but its bulb and clever skin,\u003cbr\u003efull of whatever we choose to lodge there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI haven’t been able to shake off all my grief,\u003cbr\u003emy globe’s cold poles and arid wastes,\u003cbr\u003ethe weight of death, disease and history.\u003cbr\u003eBut see how the oceans heave and shine,\u003cbr\u003esee how the clouds and mountains glisten!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe float through space. Days pass.\u003cbr\u003eSometimes we know we are part of a crystal\u003cbr\u003ewhere light is sorted and stored,\u003cbr\u003esharing an iridescence\u003cbr\u003ecobbled and million-featured.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOh tiny beacon in the hurting dark.\u003cbr\u003eOh soft blue glow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFaux Pas\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fox paused at the field’s edge, paw raised,\u003cbr\u003elooked back and switched her tail, the way\u003cbr\u003ea thrush will flutter among maple leaves—\u003cbr\u003ethat’s when I thought of you, choosing\u003cbr\u003eyour words, taking your careful steps,\u003cbr\u003esleeping so restlessly.\u003cbr\u003eOur distance is not so much miles\u003cbr\u003eas years and memories, mine such leafy compost\u003cbr\u003eI shake my head, too full of duff and humus\u003cbr\u003eto get a bearing or a fix. Foxfire, that weird\u003cbr\u003eby-product of wood-decay, pulses in me today . . .\u003cbr\u003eAnd look: after the vixen left, trailing a faint rank scent,\u003cbr\u003ea freight passed slowly, flatcars in mizzling rain,\u003cbr\u003esome of them loaded with truck trailers, some not,\u003cbr\u003eobjects that no more need attention than you need\u003cbr\u003ewaste time upon my lurching, coupled feelings.\u003cbr\u003eGo with the fox—I send a sort of blessing\u003cbr\u003eas gulls lift off the reservoir and day,\u003cbr\u003ea spreading bruise against the western rim,\u003cbr\u003edrains January and the freshened year.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMother’s Day\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003efor my children\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI see her doing something simple, paying bills,\u003cbr\u003eor leafing through a magazine or book,\u003cbr\u003eand wish that I could say, and she could hear,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethat now I start to understand her love\u003cbr\u003efor all of us, the fullness of it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt burns there in the past, beyond my reach,\u003cbr\u003ea modest lamp.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302361125093,"sku":"NP9781524712334","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781524712334.jpg?v=1767726840","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/field-of-light-and-shadow-isbn-9781524712334","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}