Elegy On Toy Piano (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Young, Dean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822958724 ISBN 13: 9780822958727

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Synopsis

In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence.
Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea takes precedence over another, and their simultaneity is frequently revealed; sadness may throw a squirrelly shadow, joy can find itself dressed in mourning black. As in the agitated \u0022Whirlpool Suite\u0022: \u0022Pain / and pleasure are two signals carried / over one phoneline.\u0022
In taking up subjects as slight as the examination of a signature or a true/false test, and as pressing as the death of friends, Young's poems embrace the duplicity of feeling, the malleability of perception, and the truth telling of wordplay.

About this title

About the Author

Dean Young has published eight previous books, most recently elegy on toy piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Embryoyo. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches in the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Reviews

Staccato and frantic, created by long series of declarative end-stopped lines, Young's sixth collection confidently balances moments of absurdity against high drama and raw admissions of emotion: "Our camouflage works best/ galloping en masse in discotheques./ We are very gentle with our young." The book is dedicated to the late Kenneth Koch; when Young writes of a power drill telling a canoe, "You don't have a clue," he really means it. The title poem recalls something of Auden's elegy for Yeats, in sentiment if not in tone, and slyly contains self-doubt: "His work has enlarged the world/ but the world is about to stop including him./ He is the tower the world runs out of." When Young's poetry works, his particular mix of the silly and the deadly serious increases the poignancy of the poems, so that in the first poem a long series of unconnected images and references (Marilyn Monroe, a squirrel hanging on a transformer, a third-grader "loose in dishwares") culminates heartrendingly in this question: "Will we never see our dead friends again?" This book of energetic, chronic juxtaposition pieces together a winning, tinkling set of send-offs for friends, and for feelings. (Feb.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822958724
• ISBN 13: 9780822958727
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 90