The Island in Winter
by Terence Young
Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 1999
Review by Michael Bryson
The Island in Winter brings to life Terence Young's tragic, tender
voice. The poems are often elegies. The subjects include the narrator's
late father, lost relationships, childhood, and simple innocence. These
are poems about the process of maturing, the process of coming to terms
with life.
From "Grip":
... the winners of
this world
are neither the most
intelligent
nor the wealthiest
but those who can hang
on the longest.
There's a memory I
have of my father
in his last days
a man who knew he was
slipping
how he took comfort
in the Volvo I drove back then
embracing its overbuilt
passenger handle
as though it were a
stair railing or the steel
stanchion of a sailing
ship
strong enough to console
a man at the end of his life ...
Young's language is simple and direct. His strongest effects leverage
the depth of his honesty, his courage to confront the deeper currents
of life. The poems do not reach for pyrotechnics, nor do they attempt
the false "realism" of too many over earnest, over gritty would-be
Buksowskis. If there is magic in his garden (and there is), it comes from
a close examination of life's common dramas.
For example, from "Letters to an Absent Wife":
I've been thinking
of taking a lover,
especially now the
apples are falling
and the last of our
ducks has been carried off.
I can think of nothing
else while such lust
surrounds me. ...
They say the earth
is spinning
but I believe it's
falling.
The speed takes my
breath away.
Here, as in many of Young's poems, his narrative strategy is to place
the reader in common territory (a love triangle), then to spin off metaphors
and observations. The poem reaches from the mundane (fallen apples) to
the cosmic (the speed of the universe), knitting together an experience
which is both transcendent and grounding.
The poems in this collection both resonate with depth and reach for
the stars.
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