Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade, 2004-2014

Description

Long regarded as one of the best narrative and dramatic poets at work in the United States, David Mason has also been regularly producing soulful lyrics. In the ten years since the publication of his last collection of shorter poems, Mason has refined his art in the fires of wrenching personal change. The result is an almost entirely new poetic voice and his most rigorous and memorable book to date. Emotionally resonant and elegant in phrasing, the poems of Sea Salt, which have appeared in publications such as Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Harper's, and Poetry, are a powerful evocation of crisis and change. These "poems of a decade" demonstrate that the author of Ludlow: A Verse Novel and The Scarlet Libretto is also a lyric poet at the top of his game.

David Mason is the Poet Laureate of Colorado. His books of poems include The Buried Houses, The Country I Remember, and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow, won the Colorado Book Award in 2007, and was named Best Book of Contemporary Poetry of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review. It was also featured on the PBS NewsHour. Mason is the author of an essay collection, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, and a memoir, News from the Village, which appeared in 2010. A new collection of essays, Two Minds of a Western Poet, followed in 2011. Mason has also written the libretti for composer Lori Laitman's opera of The Scarlet Letter, her operatic adaptation of Ludlow, and her oratorio, Vedem. A former Fulbright fellow to Greece, he lives in Colorado and Oregon and teaches at Colorado College.

"In these poems of loss, discovery and love, David Mason delivers a stunning collection that places him in a unique position in American letters. With language both simple and elegant, comprehending deeply if not always comfortably the human landscape, and finding solace in the natural world, his lines remind us that pathos lies alongside humor, that profound moments are often merely a glance away, that new possibilities in the business of living arise for those bold enough to seek them. In his embrace of tradition Mason transforms and ultimately transcends the form, making it wholly his own. A masterful poet, apart from the crowd." --Jeffrey Lent "David Mason's poems are about moments of realisation. Something is otherwise. Something has been learned with pain and still it won't settle. There are families moving through houses and institutions, ageing, losing grip, and there are the young and rising and memories of youth. The language is humane, unfussy, firm, moving but not calculated to move. And beyond the personal there is the country as it spreads through its inhabitants and leaves its mark on nature. 'Nobody gave me a god, ' ends one poem, 'so I perfect my idolatry of doubt.' It is the doubt that is moving, the way it rounds itself and speaks." --George Szirtes "Go to the heart of things, therein irony does not reside, Rilke tells us. These words came to my mind often as I read this newest collection from one of our country's finest poets. Mason's formal excellence is cause enough to celebrate these poems, but it is the emotional honesty, sentiment not sentimentality, that makes Sea Salt such a deeply moving and memorable reading experience." --Ron Rash