Pacific Light

by David Mason

Overview

David Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet “at the height of his powers.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636280578
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	08/23/2022
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	571,579
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Mason grew up in Bellingham, Washington and has lived in many parts of the world, including Greece and Colorado, where he served as poet laureate for four years. His books of poems began with The Buried Houses, The Country I Remember, and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow, was named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. It was also featured on the PBS NewsHour. He has written a memoir and four collections of essays. His poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in such periodicals as the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, and the Hudson Review. Anthologies include Best American Poetry, The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and others. He has also written libretti for operas by Lori Laitman and Tom Cipullo, all available on CD from Naxos. In 2015 Mason published two poetry collections: Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade and Davey McGravy: Tales to Be Read Aloud to Children and Adult Children. The Sound: New and Selected Poems and Voices, Places: Essays appeared in 2018. Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us? appeared in 2022. He lives with his wife Chrissy (poet Cally Conan-Davies) in Tasmania on the edge of the Southern Ocean.

Table of Contents

On the Shelf 15

The Air in Tasmania 16

The Lion on My Roof 17

Strange Creature That I Am 18

The Storm Coast 20

Crossing the Line 21

The Voices 22

Quantum of Light 24

A Word 26

The Work 27

Long Haul 28

The Lover Making Tea 29

Lives of an Immigrant 30

Pacific Light 32

The Condition of Music 34

Table Mountain 35

The First Sea Was a Sound 36

The Written Snow 37

H. M. S. Discovery 38

The End of Stories 39

Barra de Potosi 40

New Geography 41

Letter to My Right Foot 42

An Anniversary 44

Pine Needles in Snow 45

Salvaged Lines 46

To the Other Planets 48

The Solitude of Work 50

A Cabbie in America 51

Rhapsody in Blue 52

The Birthday Boy 54

His Prison 56

The Widow at 102 57

The Suicide's House 58

From a Russian Proverb 60

A Killing 61

Every Sailor in Homer 62

The Glowing 63

Afternoon Going Nowhere 64

One Day 66

Grandmother Song 68

The Mud Room 70

Are We Still Here? 71

A Wren's Weight 71

Wood 75

Under the Peppermint Gums 76

Love Poem 77

Words for Hermes 78

Painting the Shed 79

The Garden and the Library 80

Starting with Anonymous 82

Written in the Sky 83

Last Flight In 84

From a Passage in Melville 86

New Zealand Letter 87

Antipodes 90

Biographia Literaria 91

Note to Self 92

Editorial Reviews

The sonic pleasures of David Mason’s Pacific Light carried me swiftly through this stunningly crafted collection. Each poem is at its best read aloud, the accomplished rhythms emerging as a lilt and ease, a physical pleasure of the human mouth and lungs. These stories, meditations, monologues, and love songs slowly develop an expansive vision of the natural world in which the speaker is observer and participant, a brushstroke in the painting, forever in relationship to memory, to history, and to the Earth. What emerges across these poems is a full life lived in communion; what emerges across these poems is wisdom. 
—Jason Schneiderman, author of Hold Me Tight

As a poet of America’s Pacific Northwest, David Mason has found its mirror reflection in Australia’s Southeast. Turned upside down by love, he has learned “to walk upright under the Southern Cross.” Generously, he extends his feeling of renewal to all of us and urges us “to let all discovery / teach us to love the globe, that troubled child.” In Pacific Light, David Mason, one of our indispensable poets, shares his discovery of a new world—and amazingly, it turns out to be this one.
—Mark Jarman, author of Dailiness and The Heronry

In the last stanza of the last poem in David Mason’s startling and soulful new book of poems, Pacific Light, the poet writes:

The effort of a life, the wasted hour,
the kind word given to a stranger’s child are understood as kin and disappear.
Time to be grass again. Ongoing. Wild.

This stanza testifies to last things: the last journey, the last shape shifting, the last immigration in a book filled with such arrivals and departures. The formal rigor of the poems—handled with an easy and almost offhand poise—only accentuates the sense of almost constant movement, which is at the heart of the book. This book is the story of a life's deepening and reconfiguration. As such, it both inspires and challenges the reader in ways that only poetry can do. What a pleasure to read a book of poems by a poet at the height of his powers, a poet whose life has been transformed and whose poems are the embodiment of that transformation.
—Jim Moore, author of Underground: New and Selected Poems

"It’s not a simple book celebrating his new home; nor is it a book of nostalgia. Pacific Light encompasses the full reach of a life well lived, by any definition."

—Geoff Page, Australian Book Review

David Mason wrote for LARB

David Mason wrote for The Woven Table

From the Publisher