A creatively compiled union of Gary Young's greatest and most meaningful poetry and prose

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	• No Other Life Gary Young Creative Arts Book Company, 2002 - 189 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Our American Basho

I read all the prose poems I can find in anthologies and magazines. Of all the people using the prose poem now, Gary Young is the most unassuming and the best. Our American Basho, operating with zero fanfare.

These poems are short and untitled and deceptively easy to read. They are humble. And yet I've never found so much emotion in so little space. I'm on the floor before I know it.

This book actually contains three of Gary Young's previously published books: Days, Braver Deeds, and If He Had. In the poems included here, especially in Braver Deeds, there is tremendous loss of life. Parents, children and beloveds die. Imagine reading the headlines from Iraq, but without being able to close your heart.

His new poems, being published now in magazines like Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, are gentler. Celebration is made real by its grounding in the knowledge of loss. Hopefully these new poems will soon be included in a book.

All hail Gary Young! We would buy him a sushi dinner for sure, if he ever showed up in Tokyoland.

I won't quote my favorite Gary Young poems--it's better to just come across them and let them catch you unguarded. Here's one picked at random.

(from page 80)

My son is learning about death, about the possibilities. His cat was killed. Then Mark died, then Ernesto. He watched the news, and saw soldiers bulldozed into the earth after battle. Down the road, a boy his age was found floating in a pond. My son says, we're careful about water, and splashes in his own warm bath. We don't want to die, he says, we want to live forever. We only just die later, he says, and nods his head. Death is comprehensible; what comes later is a week away, or two, and never arrives.

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A creatively compiled union of Gary Young's greatest and most meaningful poetry and prose

No Other Life diligently gathers into a single volume the three books written by Gary Young and includes "Days"; "Braver Deeds" and "If He Had". No Other Life is a creatively compiled union of Gary Young's greatest and most meaningful poetry and prose. A highly recommended read any and all poetry and lyrical prose enthusiasts who appreciate these literary artforms. I had never seen her so angry, and her rage revealed a measure of love I had missed. There were many times she might have hurt me that way and didn't. p. 50

No Other Life gathers in a single volume two earlier books by Gary Young, Days and the award-winning Braver Deeds, with the final book in his trilogy, If He Had. Utilizing a radically brief prose poem that in its spare lucidity leaves after images burned into the readers imagination, Young weaves a pattern of compelling and often harrowing correspondences that Ethan Paquin described in Quarterly West as an exploration of thresholds, of levels of human endurance. Although every poem stands as an independent utterance, each book suggests a discrete poetic unit, and the entire trilogy can be read as a long poem in three parts. Critic Stephen Kessler has written: despite the tragedy at the heart of this work, there is also a sense of redemption and inspiration, of art capturing life at its most uncontrollable and squeezing out of it a sweetness that might otherwise go unnoticed.

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