num_pages: 71
description: Earthshine is a book about a wife's illness and death from cancer and the aftermath of grief. It is, necessarily, painful. Yet David Young, is meditating on despair and the loss of love, has found the "day coming up again, the world enacting its own beginnings and everything moving in this earthshine." The clouds and mountains still glisten. The earth is "a crystal where light is sorted and stored," a "tiny beacon in the hurting dark."But before new light is the dark, and David Young leads the way through the dark carefully, gently, in restrained yet penetrating words, from the shock of discovery ("the first death") to surgery, liver scans, the rude details of disease, the tightening circle of pain, the dwindling body, the spreading sorrow. Then, the search for light--at first there comes "an afterglow of love," then misery starts "to slip away" and a sky displays a blue radiance. "The tears that filled me up fill with light now."
language: English
title: Earthshine
titlecomplete: Earthshine (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
publisher: Wesleyan University Press