The Second Person
Subtitle: Poems (Stahlecker Series Selection)
Publisher: Four Way Books
Published: March 9, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 75
ISBN-13: 9781884800764
Subjects: Works by individual poets: from c 1900 -; Poetry; General; Gay men; Homosexuality in literature; Interns (Medicine); Physicians; Poetry / General; Poetry / Single Author / American
Description: The title of Young's second collection evokes the book's many concerns: romantic partnership and sex (especially between two men), the nature of the other, and the "you" to whom many of these poems are addressed. Young's preoccupation with the body comes from his medical background (he is a practicing physician) filtered through an aesthete's attention to form and lyric (most of these poems are in neat tercets). Young's speakers are caught between the desire to understand and the desire to simply desire: "It is not the bone below the skin that I kiss/ but the silence clinging to the skull's curve." The poems come to the page already burdened by a doctor's knowledge that mortality rules over even love, and the natural world becomes an analogy for human suffering: "the rain spreads like a bruise over the ocean." The long poem "Triptych at the Edge of Sight" sketches a blurry romantic "landscape filled with failure" whose all-too-human inhabitants may or may not find spiritual consolation.