Barrelhouse Reviews: American Analects by Gary Young

Reviewed by Zeke Shomler

Persea Books / July 2024 / 80 pp

“I write poems with my sons, while Buson lies in his grave just a few steps away,” writes Gary Young in his newest poetry collection. This sentence—an entire poem in itself—presents a juxtaposition that appears throughout the collection: poetry goes on, and life goes on, while death remains constantly in view.

Equally personal and philosophical, Young grounds his short, untitled prose poems in the natural world to meditate on mortality, art, and grief. They take their title and framing from the Analects of Confucius, and make heavy references to Buddhist images and philosophies. Throughout his Analects, Young continuously evokes millennia-old Eastern traditions of turning toward nonhuman life and the natural elements as symbols of impermanence and sources of wisdom:

Each night, an owl cries out from the redwoods. He calls, and I call back. I call, and he answers. We share the same bright moon, the same shadows, and the same fate. The possibility of discussion is limitless; we have no secrets. This morning I discovered an owl pellet by the front door—a wad of fur, and a jumble of femurs and little ribs—oracle bones, easy to decipher.

This poem offers a total openness to the wisdom of the world, and a deep kind of knowing. The owl’s “oracle bones” offer a vison of death—both as the means and the message.

But this poetry is not confined to owls and rivers and gardenias—Young’s poems continually look toward human relationships, including with his late mentor, Gene Holtan, as sources of wisdom and guidance. In doing so, the author-speaker becomes both student and (sometimes literally) teacher, receiving insight from others before imparting it upon readers in precise, image-rich prose. This wisdom often centers around art, knowledge, and death itself, to offer perseverance and careful attention in return:

Gene said, it’s impossible to be honest with yourself; it isn’t achievable for anyone. The world is incomprehensible, and our senses defeat us. I asked him, isn’t there anything we can believe in? Of course, he said, but it should be something arbitrary. He gazed out the window—ah, clouds.

In asking us to “believe in” clouds, this poem surrenders to both the changing nature of things and the instability of self, the ever-shifting interconnectedness of self with other. As one fragment of the Confucian Analects goes: “The Master said, There is a teaching: there are no divisions.” Young echoes this both thematically and formally as he relies on his own spiritual mentor to deliver a message about permeability and the limits of knowledge.

Despite their firm grounding in ancient philosophy, these poems do not shy away from contemporary social issues. The COVID-19 pandemic underpins Young’s work as the poems move through and around death. These few gestures toward contemporary woes provide an urgency and timeliness to the ancient themes with which Young puts them in conversation. Climate change, too, brings a similar new urgency to the consideration of nature. In a world where “every breath is a burial,” Young balances hope with destruction, doubt with certainty, death with the small beauties of life.

This collection is a quiet feat of poetic form. The succinct prose format lends itself well to the delivery of everyday insights—concrete images combine with abstract statements about life, art, and knowledge in small, direct packages. Certain poems move smoothly from image to wisdom:

I saw a snowy egret standing on a mat of kelp, bobbing with the swells and the tide. There were sailboats, fog on the far side of the bay, a little chop beyond the point. When I told Gene, he said, it’s an astonishment that each day is different from each other, that things are inconsistent day-to-day.

This is a poetry that insists upon “astonishment”—even when faced with grief and loss, this speaker pays careful attention to the people and the worldly inhabitants around him, which swell with meaning and provide the grounds for hope. This is not an unearned sentimentality, but a shimmering resilience. As the book concludes, the speaker remains dedicated to listening to the natural world for its deeper truths amid pain and uncertainty: “The world roils and churns beneath us, while overhead, stars are whirling to a tune I can almost hear. The words, I already know.”

Zeke Shomler is an MA/MFA candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.