The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems, 1990-2000

In this latest collection, Al Young demonstrates why his poetry is loved and followed worldwide. At a time when most American poets are writing what Lawrence Ferlinghetti calls “a kind of prose masquerading in the typography of poetry,” Al Young sings. His ear for music never lets him forget that the body is the boom-box of poetry. A master of dramatic monologue, Young continues to work in the many voices and forms that distinguish his work. Rare among contemporary poets, he almost never uses the pronoun “I” to refer to himself. His contempt for the unremitting arrogance of the confessional mode is hardly a secret. Like poets across the ages, Young is grounded and experienced in the pride and prejudice of his own times, and yet he can jump right over the moon and straight at the sun. Whether sonnetizing love or loss, laughing at smug social presumptions, condemning CIA drug deals, the thriving prison industry, bio-tech food, greed in a darkening stockocracy, or celebrating eternal verities, Al Young writes with spirit, imagination, and hope.