Chatoyant

Pleasure
By Gary Young
Heyday Books, 2006
Review by Suki Wessling
Published in caesura, fall 2006

At eighty-nine pages, Gary Young's new collection of poems, Pleasure (Heyday Books), is a standard length for a book of poetry. But like the pleasures that it catalogues, it feels short. Time is compressed into a burst of flavors, conversations, and sensations, and when the end comes, we are lucky that this is a pleasure that can be experienced again.

Readers of Young's previous work will not be surprised by the format--short, elliptical untitled prose poems--or Young's ability to weave poetry from the barest details of life. The simplicity of the subject matter belies the complexity of the poems themselves: children's bodies, water, birds, a cigar, a lover, sleep. There's nothing fancy here, just a poet, "small, but not insignificant." One poem, in its entirety, reads, "He says, you write poems about what you see: trees, clouds, the mailbox, and me, Cooper."

The structure of many of the poems is perhaps like a Moebius strip: They open and turn back upon themselves as they return. The first poem in the collection, about holding his son's naked body, is a musing on what the self is. It starts with a negation of self--"It's a joy to be subtracted from the world"--and ends in self-affirmation--"I have become such a fine thing, the resting-place for a body I can know." Later, a long winter is identified by its "sullen sky," but Young's acceptance and redemption comes when he changes from the senses of sight and touch (the sky and the rain), to his ears. "To think," he tells us, "I almost turned a deaf ear to heaven."

Death is a frequent visitor to these poems, as in previous collections, but here its inevitability heightens pleasures rather than dampens them. Trimming an apple tree, he imagines he "would like to lie down on a bed of apple boughs like that, and leave this earth as sweet, sweet smoke, but not yet." It's the appreciation of the action (pruning the tree), the company (his son), and the senses (the sweet, sweet smoke), that are emphasized here. Death, like punctuation, sets off the sensation as pleasure.

The recurring pleasure of food is what the book rests upon as it builds upon more and more of the bounty in the modern Western American life--sliced lemons, marinated salmon, foraged mushrooms, fresh-caught tuna, oysters at the market, fresh thyme, one gorgeous piece of sushi that elicits applause, a tomato ("belladonna's passionate cousin"), fresh-picked berries, chicken with wild mushrooms. Near the end of the book the power goes out, and as if in a culmination of all this feasting, we get to eat what is in Young's freezer, gorging ourselves meal after meal by candlelight.

The lushness of the book is reminiscent of the food, nature, and sleep depicted by the Impressionist painters, and leads to a contemplation of the relationship between the book and the mission statement of its publisher, Heyday Books. A note at the back tells us that Heyday publishes books "that foster an understanding of California history, literature, art, environment, social issues, and culture." Although Pleasure is at its core a work of art, an expression of the artist, its value is enhanced by Young's keen eye for place and culture. Like an Impressionist painting, each of these delicate drops in a man's life offers us a window into a time that will soon be past.

Anyone who lives in Young's world will recognize that he has captured some essential bits of who we are and where we live, and that his book, right now a living work of art by a living artist, will transform itself also into a document of a place in one time. We can't know what will be important in the future, but Young's catalogue of his life pleasures creates a portrait of what is important to one man in this time. A reader of the future will be able to see a grizzly tooth in the dirt and like Young, find "my skillful child's eye, a grace I thought I'd lost."

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