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Book Of Hours: Poems (2014)

by Kevin Young(Favorite Author)

4.29 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0307272249 (ISBN13: 9780307272249)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Knopf

review 1: What I like about this collection is that it talks about grief over time and not just in that crashing first days and weeks experience. This is a collection that covers ten years and not just ten hours, as the title might suggest. It begins with the sudden death, ten years ago, of his father, that's the heart of it, the foundation of the book, the backdrop of everything, and moves through his wife's miscarriage and the birth of his son. Through all this we get the sense of his father. I think the first and last sections are great and would have been enough, really. There's also a few very fine poems recognized by The Best American Poetry series… and much of it is published and in great places, but I just thought it was too much, too long, could have been a tighter collec... moretion to make it stronger...
review 2: In the poem “Solace” Kevin Young describes how “Desire’s murmur // is not fire / but water waded / out into, or washed // over us, undertow / we feed & are / fed from— // the absolution / of skin.” And in the poem “Wintering” he explains how “Mourning, I’ve learned, is just / a moment, many, // grief the long betrothal / beyond. Grief what / we wed.” From his new volume of poetry, Book of Hours, these excerpts provide only a small glimpse of why Kevin Young is a master of the compact verse, a master at making profound observations with very few words.In the volume’s first two sections titled “(Domesday Book)” and “(The Book of Forgetting)” the poems address Young’s grief and his haunting remembrances over the loss of his father. Although sorrowful and full of mourning, these pieces express more deeply the honor and reverence he had for his father. In the section that follows titled “(Confirmation)” Young delivers a series of poems that reflect upon his pending fatherhood and the birth of his son. This section gushes with overwhelming emotion. In each of these first three sections, the poems are exceptional, and pitch-perfect in tone, rhythm, and word choice. The ideas in each poem flow seamlessly into one another, and the themes powerfully reinforce and expand from poem to poem. The final two sections of the book are more abstract and rambling. They lack the specificity and poignancy of the earlier poems. Yet one of the best pieces, “Ruth,” appears late in the volume. It reiterates feelings of sorrow and how to overcome them. Young discusses how “Every pore mourns. / Not the brain, nor / the chest where bereavement // nests, but the body, whole— / how it burns.” Later in that same poem, he observes how “Even healing // hurts. Our bodies / leave us little / choice—scars // that way are ruthless.” Overall, Kevin Young’s new collection of poems establishes its power in the first half of the book, and that is enough to make this a sensational work from one of America’s preeminent poets. less

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