Stones Poems

Review by Booklist Review

Poet and scholar Young, editor of the invaluable anthology African American Poetry (2020), often anchors his own poems to historical figures, music, and pop culture, as in Brown (2018). He also writes deeply personal poems, as in Book of Hours (2014), to which this new collection is closely linked in its distilled meditations on the deep resonance of family and home. The speaker in Young's poems, which are built out of succinct and vital tercets, continues to mourn his father. But now he has a toddler son who revels in their visits to their extended family's rural home, a place of "sunburnt earth," trees, ivy, frogs, cows, and a horse. There are daylilies, "their mouths / orange & asking," and "lightning / bugs who beacon // & beckon." Evocations of church services, rain, sun, and the music of the dark entwine nature and human longing. Stones are compressions of time and life; gravestones mark loss. While "the dirt will try // to forget. / the stones hope // to remember." For Young, words are stones; poems are cairns.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

With superbly crafted poems that engage the past and the present, Young (Brown: Poems) delivers another ambitious collection across seven lyrically powerful sections. The book's epigraph, "the stones hope to remember," signals Young's interest in history and memorializing, echoed in "Ivy," which ends on "the quiet/ of this place, the graves/ awaiting names," and in "Sting," "the agony/ of growing, the great/ effort, trying// not to die." Graves prove a powerful motif throughout. In "Vault," Young recalls his toddler son, who "skips stone// to stone, hollering happily/ on the slabs with bodies/ unmarked beneath." In the subsequent poem, "Boneyard," the image grows more historically complicated, "Like heat he seeks them,/ my son, thirsting/ to learn those/ he don't know/ are his dead." "Grief's evergreen," he announces in "Spruce," but there is ample hope across the collection, too, most of it derived from love. "Till the end/ we sing/ into the wind," he writes in "Dolor," while other poems emphasize the redeeming roles of family and parenting. These elegant, measured poems offer insight into the troubled moment through an exhumation of the past, while giving the reader plenty of depth and beauty to carry into the future. (Sept.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Bidart, whose multiple awards include a Pulitzer, tops off five decades of writing with a book arguing Against Silence in its embrace of the world.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Resume Where the train once rained through town like a river, where the water rose in early summer & froze come winter-- where the moon of the outhouse shone its crescent welcome, where the heavens opened & the sun wouldn't quit-- past the gully or gulch or holler or ditch I was born. Or, torn-- Dragged myself atop this mountain fueled by flour, butter- milk, grease fires. Where I'm from women speak in burnt tongues & someone's daddy dug a latrine so deep up from the dark dank bottom springs a tree. Excerpted from Stones: Poems by Kevin Young All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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