Stones becomes an ode to Young’s home places and his dear departed, and to what of them – of us – poetry can save. In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South-one poem, 'Kith,' exploring that strange bedfellow of 'kin'-the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. Whether it’s the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering, precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. ‘Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don’t know / are his dead.’ ‘We sleep long, / if not sound,’ Kevin Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, ‘Till the end / we sing / into the wind.’ In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South – one poem, ‘Kith’, exploring that strange bedfellow of ‘kin’ – the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. The best collection yet from an important and much celebrated US poet – the poetry editor of the New Yorker and director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture – and the first of his books to be published in the UK.Ī book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, ‘one of the poetry stars of his generation’ ( Los Angeles Times).
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