The book of hours kevin young5/10/2023 The metaphor suggests that grief is a partnership, a sacred exchange, neither a linear process nor something to overcome. The speaker in “Wintering” experiences perhaps the book’s largest and most provocative epiphany: There are moments when, overcome by despair, the speaker longs to join his father in death, but ultimately the poems move toward acceptance. Similarly, in the poem “Mercy,” he transforms organ donation into an occasion of arresting lyricism: “It was your liver/ lifted out of you / & set like a bloody stone / inside somebody / else to save.” His empathy extends so far as to declare in “Exit Music”: “May I bless the man / who shot you // May I hold you / as he must have / praying & cursing / … His long mile to the nearest / house for help.” Young diffuses his grief with humor and by considering how his father’s death sustains the lives of others. Brothers-in-paw.” But Young does not push the punchlines too far, concluding the poem on a note of responsibility and compassion: The speaker finds his father’s dogs kenneled behind the empty house and quips, “I’ve begun to think of them / as my father’s other sons, / as kin. Throughout his career, Young has demonstrated a predilection for the pun, a device he uses in the poem “Bereavement” to mitigate his pain. The first two sections of Kevin Young’s latest poetry collection, Book of Hours, treat the accidental death of his father while hunting, illustrating a complex portrait of a grieving son.
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