Mason - The sound: new & selected poems

Mason is by no means a strict nature poetone of his best-known poems is about helping his aging father go to the bathroombut its hard to overlook his reverence for the physical world in its infinite variety.

Leath Tonino, High Country News

for SEA SALT (2014)

... a poet to listen to, and to trust.

Kate Hendry, The Dark Horse

Sea Salt is the real thing: one of our most authentic and accomplished poets at the top of his lyric form.

Andrew Frisardi, Angle

for ARRIVALS (2004)

The language and authenticity of poem after poem provide the pleasure of discovery.

W. S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shadow of Sirius

Mason is a poet who justifies his claims. His forms breathe.

Brian Phillips, Poetry

for THE COUNTRY I REMEMBER (1996)

This 1,300-line family and national saga is narrative poetry at its best.

Publishers Weekly starred review

Readers, dont miss this book.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

This is a work of extraordinary warmth, vigor, imagination, and sympathy.

Joyce Carol Oates, author of them and Blonde

POETRY

Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade
Ludlow: A Verse Novel
Arrivals
The Country I Remember
Land Without Grief (Chapbook)
The Buried Houses
Small Elegies (Chapbook)

FOR CHILDREN

Davey McGravy

ESSAYS

Voices, Places
Two Minds of a Western Poet
The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry

MEMOIR

News from the Village

DRAMATIC WORKS

The MercyA New Oresteia
After Life (Opera by Tom Cipullo)
The Scarlet Libretto (Opera by Lori Laitman)
Vedem (Oratorio by Lori Laitman)

EDITED

Contemporary American Poems (in China)
Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (with John Frederick Nims)
Twentieth-Century American Poetry (with Dana Gioia and Meg Schoerke)
Twentieth-Century American Poetics (with Dana Gioia and Meg Schoerke)
Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (with Mark Jarman)

David Mason

Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA

The Sound: New & Selected Poems
Copyright 2018 by David Mason
All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

Book design by Selena Trager

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mason, David, 1954author.
Title: The sound: new and selected poems / by David Mason.
Description: Pasadena: Red Hen Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017033240 | ISBN 9781597096133 | eISBN 9781597097574
Classification: LCC PS3563.A7879 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.54dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033240

The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, and the Amazon Literary Partnership partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition

Published by Red Hen Press

www.redhen.org

New poems in this book first appeared in the following periodicals: Able Muse, the Canberra Times (Australia), the Colorado Independent, The Dark Horse (UK), the Dirty Goat, the Hopkins Review, the Hudson Review, Measure, the New Criterion, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Pequod, Pilgrimage Magazine, Poetry, Quadrant (Australia), the Robert Frost Review, San Diego Reader, Southwest Review, the Times Literary Supplement (UK), Translation, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Yale Review.

Poems from earlier collections originally appeared in these publications: the American Scholar, Boulevard, CrossCurrents, The Dark Horse (UK), Divide, Harpers Magazine, the Hudson Review, Image, Measure, the New Criterion, the New Yorker, North Dakota Quarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Radio Silence, Sequoia, the Sewanee Review, Solo, the Southern Review, the Threepenny Review, the Times Literary Supplement (UK), and the Yale Review.

I wish to thank the editors of the following anthologies where some of these poems appeared: Best American Poetry 2012 (Mark Doty and David Lehman), Best American Poetry 2018 (Dana Gioia and David Lehman), Beyond Forgetting (Holly J. Hughes), A Broken Heart Still Beats (Anne McCracken and Mary Semel), Contemporary American Poetry (R. S. Gwynn and April Lindner), Introduction to Poetry (Dana Gioia and X. J. Kennedy), Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range (David D. Horowitz), Many Trails to the Summit (David D. Horowitz), Measure for Measure (Annie Finch and Alexandra Oliver), New Poets of the American West (Lowell Jaeger), The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Rita Dove), Poetry Out Loud (Dan Stone and Stephen Young), Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (R. S. Gwynn), Poets Translate Poets (Paula Deitz), Rhyming Poems (William Baer), Story Hour (Sonny Williams), and The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry (Jay Parini).

Thanks as well to these websites where some poems appeared: Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), American Life in Poetry, Poetry Daily, and The Writers Almanac.

Aralia Press, Dacotah Territory Press, JonesAlley Press, and The Press at Colorado College published chapbooks and limited editions in which some of these poems appeared. I wish to thank in particular Aaron Cohick, Brian Molanphy, Michael Peich, Sally Quinn, Joan Stone, and Mark Vinz for their fine work.

Poetry publishers do heroic labor for little reward. I owe a particular debt to Mark Cull, Kate Gale, and Robert McDowell, all three of whom have put their lives on the line for poetry.

for Chrissy

An Authors Note

The Sound is a location, my place of origin and womb of words, but it is also an aspiration and aural guide. The sound is the gold in the ore, Frost wrote. One hears something and wants to make a corresponding sound. I have been hard of hearing all my life, catching vowels more than consonants, so the sound I follow is watery. I hope you can hear it too.

Assembling this book has allowed me to revise some earlier work. No revision in a poem is minor, but some changes may be noticeable only to me. I have not grouped poems by subject or genre, but have allowed for accidental discoveries as well as a kind of walking backwards.