Fall Higher
By Dean Young
4/5
()
About this ebook
Dean Young
Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA from Indiana University. His collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010).
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Reviews for Fall Higher
1 rating2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Reading Dean Young's poetry is probably the most paradox-like experience I've ever had in my life. His poetry is surreal - made up of many concrete images that can be so bizarre to visualize. The strange thing here is that nevertheless, these wild images are accompanied by a feeling that the poet knows you. To me, he really knows how to put into words those fleeting feelings that are very much present though we may not know fully how to describe them. His daring images capture those sensations we can't quite, and in just a perfect way that even though you may be reading the most bizarre poem you've read in your life, something resonates with you because you know he put into words a feeling you haven't figured out how to describe yet. His poetry is also filled with humor and wit and this is just a fantastic collection overall.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poetry paints nothing but it splashescolor, flushed, swooning, echolatingand often associated with flightas in Keats's viewless wings of Poesy,a weird statement. The wings can't see?Are invisible like Wonder Woman's plane?Poetry is a good provider of the strange.(From the poem Non-Apologia)In his Fall Higher collection of poems Dean Young once again is a good provider of the strange. He's often referred to as "one of our most inventive poets", and that's what I like best about him - his ability to make us look at the world with a fresh eye, and often laugh at it, through his sometimes stream of consciousness connections and laser-true commentary. In this one he seems more bilious than in previous collections; those feeling chirpily sanguine (phrase cribbed from Richard) may find themselves more morose and disgruntled after reading this one.In this poem, titled Undertow, he has the sea thinking about itself with a "sudden out-loud laughter snort":Oh, what thehell, I probably drove myself crazythinks the sea, kissing all those strangers,forgiving them no matter what, liarsin confession, vomiters of plasticsand fossil fuels but what a strickenelixir I've become even to my becalmed depths,while through its head swim a millionfishes seemingly made of lighteating each other.He knows he can be hard to follow. At one point he says, "Try to stay with me, okay?" (Wolf Lying in Snow). And he can be silly. "I like napkins folded into swans/ because I like wiping my mouth on swans." (Commencement Address). He can be romantic:because of you I'm talking to crickets, clouds,confiding in a cat. Everyone saysCome to your senses, and I do, of you.Every touch electric, every taste you,every smell, even burning sugar, everycry and laugh. Toothpicked samplesat the farmer's market, every melon,plum, I come undone, undone.(Delphiniums in a Window Box).And for me he can be profound. After wondering over our fallacies in some detail, he concludes:We have absolutely no proofgod isn't an insectrubbing her hind legs together to sing.Or boring into us like a yellow jacketinto a fallen, overripe pear.Or an assassin bug squatting over us,shoving a proboscis right throughour breastplate then sipping.How wonderful our poisons don't kill her.(Selected Recent and New Errors). Yikes! That makes it hard to be chirpily sanguine, but it sure snaps the eyes open.
Book preview
Fall Higher - Dean Young
1
Lucifer
You can read almost anything
about angels, how they bite off
the heads first, copulate with tigers,
tortured Miles Davis until he stuck
a mute in his trumpet to torture them back.
The pornographic magazines ported
into the redwoods. The sweetened breath
of the starving. The prize livestock
rolls over on her larval young,
the wooden dwarf turning in the cogs
of the clockworks. I would have
a black bra hanging from the shower rod.
I would have you up against
the refrigerator with its magnets
for insurance agents and oyster bars.
Miracles, ripped thumbnails,
everything a piece of something else,
archangelic, shadow-clawed,
the frolicking despair of repeating
decimals because it never comes out even.
Mostly the world is lava’s rhythm,
the impurities of darkness
sometimes called stars. Mostly
the world is assignations, divorces
conducted between rooftops. Forever
and forever the checkbook unbalanced,
the beautiful bodies bent back
like paper clips, the discharged
blandishing cardboard signs by the exits.
Coppers and silvers and radiant traces,
gold flecks from our last brush,
brushfires. Always they’re espousing
accuracy when it’s accident, the arrow
not in the aimed-for heart but throat
that has the say. There are no transitions,
only falls.
Red Glove Thrown in Rosebush
If only bodies weren’t so beautiful.
Even rabbits are made of firecrackers
so tiny they tickle your hand.
If only the infirmities,
blocked neural pathways, leg braces
and bandages didn’t make all these bodies
look like they’re dancing.
Breathing will destroy us, hearts
like ninja stars stuck into the sternums
of granite caesars. Should I worry
people have stopped saying how skinny
and pale I am? Paul may destroy the kitchen
but he’s the best cook I know.
Seared tuna, pesto risotto—where
did he get those tomatoes?—what a war
must be fought for simplicity!
Even the alligator, flipped over,
is soft as an eyelid. Hans, the trapezist,
got everyone high on New Year’s Eve
with a single joint, the girl he was with
a sequin it was impossible not to want
to try to catch without a net.
Across the bay, fireworks punched
luminous bruises in the fog.
If only my body wasn’t borrowed from dust!
This Evening from Far Away
The jackals have their sideways reproaches,
the great-aunts their brooches crusted
with emeralds or rubies or paste, the wine
has its slowness, the commuter her haste
but inside each thing is also something other,
strange, counter, shadow of an airplane
inside the raincoat, chessman in the otter,
pirouette in the luncheonette, note
emerging two octaves out of range.
Everlasting is comrade to this moment’s
flash; glance away, it’s another day,
you’ve lost one chance but here’s another,
some cash, a sublet by the water; all
this bother moving place to place, shifting
syntax, anxiety attacks, the fights
and late-night make-ups, disgrace,
mercy in the friend’s face may make rich
recollection lying on the deathbed or
seconds after a head-bonk ends it
and from eternity’s cracked-open lid
that first pet the vet injected
while you held a paw and wept
bounds forth as if from your own chest
to greet you.
Scarecrow on Fire
We all think about suddenly disappearing.
The train tracks lead there, into the woods.
Even in the financial district: wooden doors
in alleyways. First I want to put something small
into your hand, a button or river stone or
key I don’t know to what. I don’t
have that house anymore across from the graveyard
and its black angel. What counts as a proper
goodbye? My last winter in Iowa there was always
a ladybug or two in the kitchen for cheer
even when it was ten below. We all feel
suspended over a drop into nothingness.
Once you get close enough, you see what
one is stitching is a human heart. Another
is vomiting wings. Hell, even now I love life.
Whenever you put your feet on the floor
in the morning, whatever the nightmare,
it’s a miracle or fantastic illusion:
the solidity of the boards, the steadiness
coming into the legs. Where did we get
the idea when we were kids to rub dirt
into the wound or was that just in Pennsylvania?
Maybe poems are made of breath, the way water,
cajoled to boil, says, This is my soul, freed.
Madrigal
Maybe we put too much faith in the heart
when any blockhead knows everything falls apart,
turn to mush the storied administrations of the brain,
there’s no statue that won’t eventually dissolve in rain,
the continents are in pieces, the empire a mess,
the fleece full of holes, the rivers distressed.
Not what we promised and swore, didn’t and did,
not the terrible things that happened to us as kids
makes much diff. We’re the