Elegy On Toy Piano

By Dean Young

In Elegy on Toy Piano, Dean Young's sixth book of poems, elegiac necessity finds itself next to goofy celebration. Daffy Duck enters the Valley of the Eternals. Faulkner and bell-bottoms cling to beauty's evanescence. Even in single poems, Young's tone and style vary. No one feeling or idea takes precedence over another, and their simultaneity is frequently revealed; sadness may throw a squirrelly shadow, joy can find itself dressed in mourning black. As in the agitated "Whirlpool Suite": "Pain / and pleasure are two signals carried / over one phoneline." In taking up subjects as slight as the examination of a signature or a true/false test, and as pressing as the death of friends, Young's poems embrace the duplicity of feeling, the malleability of perception, and the truth telling of wordplay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Mar 13, 2005
• ISBN: 9780822991045

Dean Young

Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and received his MFA from Indiana University. His collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010).

Book preview

Thrown as if Fierce & Wild

You don't have a clue, says the power drill

to the canoe hanging from the rafters.

Is life a contest everything plays

by different rules for different prizes?

You're really worthless, aren't you?

barks the cherry tree covered with eponymous

fruit to the wagon lying on its side.

Unfair! Wasn't that wagon not two days ago

leading the parade, the puppy refusing

to wear her hat? Can't you just leave me

alone? says the big picture of Marilyn

Monroe behind her nonreflective glass.

Is the universe infinity in ruckus

and wrack? The third grader loose

in dishwares, the geo-tech

weeping on the beach. Mine, mine,

says the squirrel to the transformer,

unclear on the capacities of electricity.

String of X-mas lights tangled with

extension cords, can't you work things out?

The young couple takes a step toward the altar,

increasing the magnetic force that sends

ex-lovers whorling off into nether nebulae

but attracting mothers-in-law. In one wing,

the oxygen mask taken from the famous writer

of terza rima glee while in another

an infant arrives, loudly disappointed

to have to do everything now himself,

no longer able to breathe underwater.

Will we never see our dead friends again?

A motorcycle roars on the terrible screw

of the parking structure, lava

heaves itself into the frigid strait.

Evening Primrose

Beauty doesn't only reside in bodies

but bodies present the strongest evidence

of its presence and cruelty

as it flies away. A million maggots

wriggle the giraffe's wound. The flood

leaves behind its mud in the lunette.

I'm tired of this real estate agent,

says Beauty, and leaps into the lumpish

baby just as one moves from the walk-through

above the city of singing garbage men

to the hear-the-waves-from-here beach shack.

It is true that wherever Beauty goes

it will not stay, but can it be delayed?

Yes. Epoxy. Zipper replaced, neck

adjusted, avoidance of UV rays.

Can Beauty come back when it hath gone?

Yep. After adolescence. Look at this tree

that was beautiful when its blossoms

twittered in the leftward breeze but

then went through a bark-scab, leaf-

splotched phase but now is beautiful again

albeit kinda spooky. So you can see

death is no guarantee one way or the other.

The monkey pulls his beard, the tenor

loses his ping, the sports car smashed

to a dot. Faulkner in and out of print.

Bell bottoms. The tree stands on its chunk

of dirt hurtling through the void,

not even holding onto a strap. Dreams

are oblong, squeezed between dark columns.

In the hallways run a hundred children

in blue capes.

Glory

Some sadness has no origin, says the father

tying his son to a post.

I wake up asleep.

Most monkeys die of dislocations in the wild.

My remote, where is it? Awful things

have happened to Daffy Duck.

Was that the cause or result of his daffiness?

His bill blasted to the back of his head.

His eyes bounced around.

Deep inside his male-feathered brain

is the need to fuck or fuck up

everything beautiful, even the Parthenon.

Yet he returns again and again from what

would kill and make inedible

an ordinary duck.

Is this too a power of daffiness?

How unlike being a dead pharaoh,

which is damned serious business.

They lay you down and dig in.

Here's a lovely scarab-encrusted jar

for your pancreas. Here's a hook

to pull your brains through your nose.

Not great for your slaves either, strangled

and pickled in lesser materials.

And lots of cats. In the Valley of Eternals,

you're perpetually in profile, talking

out of the side of your mouth to jackals.

The air smells of lilacs and barbed wire.

You enter the ballerina's lair.

Avalanche Garden

In the middle of the 45th year

of his education, Dean Young falls

in the Amphitheater while attempting

to rappel without a top rope anchor.

Poor creature, learning to fly by

scaring itself into using its gill-flaps

wrong. Below the roaring sky, roaring

earth. Are we there yet? An attractive

but untried way of obtaining data

about the excited-state Dean Young

involves study of photochemical

behavior in

Reviews for Elegy On Toy Piano

[abirdman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Edgy, funny, nervous, sad. Dean Young is the real thing. This is a satisfying book of poetry. It was also a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.