Event Magazine
“ The lyric voice is the first voice of poetry, yet the hardest to define. We memorialize, confirm and reassure ourselves; we write poems that present a sometimes sideways logic or attitude intended for the consumption and assimilation of others. To be better, more critically astute scientists, we leave behind personal preoccupations for larger communcal or societal contentions.
This does not explain why the lyrics voice is the most generally attractive. Lyric voice is not wholly interior; even when a poem may be explicitly about the details of the author, that experience is somehow dissimulated. It is unrecognizable to the writer, surprising, even foreign.
In this vein, Terence Young's Moving Day has its own particular attitude. The circumstances of events feel familiar, as if they come from the experience of the author himself.
Inside everything that is familiar, however it may flirt with the trap of cliché, there is an advantage of an inherent symbolic organization. When the poetry is uncovered the results are devastating and magical to the reader. The rule often is, the simpler the language the harder poetry hits:
You think you can predict the form
your journey will take,
how the past will appear to you,
a dream you will one day learn
to summon at will.
There are surprises — the surprise of assuming a different identity that the one we know, of owning what is different than ourselves:
Winter's back, as ugly as the woman I sleep with.
Another four months pulling myself around
in the dark, guessing at scars that brush
my lips. The season of trains,
of lines in general.
Ironically, this transformation serves as a buffer, which we use to protect ourselves, to give us the ability to be more 'honest' when the times is right. Where what seems like nothing more that a mess of words can be endowed with great sudden meaning.
In intimate poems like 'My Young Wife One Confessed' and 'The Benediction,' there is a migration or a leaving behind and an effort to absolve or clear house before the big 'moving day.' That 'moving day' is a time of new meaning or new poetic philosophy:
Tom and I are walking to the corner store
for licorice
when Gary Prescott blocks our path and
tells us to get down on our knees.
He is two grades ahead of us,
already shaving and hair like a rain cloud.
We are to tell him that our mothers
have sex with each other,
that our fathers lick our sisters like dogs.
I know nothing
about the past, about what is rare and
what is commonplace.
Everything, even cruelty, is
a mystery I am willing to learn.
What do we leave behind? What do we hold onto? And how do we move ahead? These various states of being direct Young's division of labour: 'When You Become Young Again,' 'Hostages' and 'Brave.' They make Young's collection a complete work, one almost devoid of pretension, deft in movement, full of passion, a passion to remain homegrown and refuse to indulge in rhetoric. Young is already on the quest for a pure Canadian poetry.”
“ The lyric voice is the first voice of poetry, yet the hardest to define. We memorialize, confirm and reassure ourselves; we write poems that present a sometimes sideways logic or attitude intended for the consumption and assimilation of others. To be better, more critically astute scientists, we leave behind personal preoccupations for larger communcal or societal contentions.
This does not explain why the lyrics voice is the most generally attractive. Lyric voice is not wholly interior; even when a poem may be explicitly about the details of the author, that experience is somehow dissimulated. It is unrecognizable to the writer, surprising, even foreign.
In this vein, Terence Young's Moving Day has its own particular attitude. The circumstances of events feel familiar, as if they come from the experience of the author himself.
Inside everything that is familiar, however it may flirt with the trap of cliché, there is an advantage of an inherent symbolic organization. When the poetry is uncovered the results are devastating and magical to the reader. The rule often is, the simpler the language the harder poetry hits:
You think you can predict the form
your journey will take,
how the past will appear to you,
a dream you will one day learn
to summon at will.
There are surprises — the surprise of assuming a different identity that the one we know, of owning what is different than ourselves:
Winter's back, as ugly as the woman I sleep with.
Another four months pulling myself around
in the dark, guessing at scars that brush
my lips. The season of trains,
of lines in general.
Ironically, this transformation serves as a buffer, which we use to protect ourselves, to give us the ability to be more 'honest' when the times is right. Where what seems like nothing more that a mess of words can be endowed with great sudden meaning.
In intimate poems like 'My Young Wife One Confessed' and 'The Benediction,' there is a migration or a leaving behind and an effort to absolve or clear house before the big 'moving day.' That 'moving day' is a time of new meaning or new poetic philosophy:
Tom and I are walking to the corner store
for licorice
when Gary Prescott blocks our path and
tells us to get down on our knees.
He is two grades ahead of us,
already shaving and hair like a rain cloud.
We are to tell him that our mothers
have sex with each other,
that our fathers lick our sisters like dogs.
I know nothing
about the past, about what is rare and
what is commonplace.
Everything, even cruelty, is
a mystery I am willing to learn.
What do we leave behind? What do we hold onto? And how do we move ahead? These various states of being direct Young's division of labour: 'When You Become Young Again,' 'Hostages' and 'Brave.' They make Young's collection a complete work, one almost devoid of pretension, deft in movement, full of passion, a passion to remain homegrown and refuse to indulge in rhetoric. Young is already on the quest for a pure Canadian poetry.”
BC Bookworld 2007
Moving Day (Signature $14.95) Review
from Hannah Main-Van Der Kamp
Memories can often take the drifting shape of hypnogogia, that state between dreaming and awakening where odd clarities and cloudy sensations present themselves without apparent connection. In Moving Day, tender-hearted Terence Young tells his life as sunny days with cloudy periods.
“A marvel, really, all
these bits that come together
like a math equation when
it looms into sense:
I live here,
These are the people I love.”
Blending literate humour (a lonely kid quotes William of Occam in Latin to a bag lady) with day-to-day domesticity (those garden-darkening plum trees really must come down), Young is alternately wistful, funny and hyperbolic. He doesn’t unfold the Big Themes of War and Peace, Gain and Loss. He’s a skilled poet who can relate the universals within the world of his own street, heightened by occasional travel and his hesitant fidelities as son, friend, lover, husband, father and son again.
A breathless argument with a contractor over a collapsed sundeck, tongue-in-cheek solutions to the expense of raising children and the burden of excess friends, disposal of family heirlooms in an imagined auction; the over-arching impression is one of challenged contentment, “the dramatics over.” The contentment is tinged here and there with confusion but not with regrets.
If you have lived in the Victoria area most of your life and, in mid-life, enjoy reminiscing, then this blackberry patch is for you. 1-897109-11-3
--review by Hannah Main-Van Der Kamp
Moving Day (Signature $14.95) Review
from Hannah Main-Van Der Kamp
Memories can often take the drifting shape of hypnogogia, that state between dreaming and awakening where odd clarities and cloudy sensations present themselves without apparent connection. In Moving Day, tender-hearted Terence Young tells his life as sunny days with cloudy periods.
“A marvel, really, all
these bits that come together
like a math equation when
it looms into sense:
I live here,
These are the people I love.”
Blending literate humour (a lonely kid quotes William of Occam in Latin to a bag lady) with day-to-day domesticity (those garden-darkening plum trees really must come down), Young is alternately wistful, funny and hyperbolic. He doesn’t unfold the Big Themes of War and Peace, Gain and Loss. He’s a skilled poet who can relate the universals within the world of his own street, heightened by occasional travel and his hesitant fidelities as son, friend, lover, husband, father and son again.
A breathless argument with a contractor over a collapsed sundeck, tongue-in-cheek solutions to the expense of raising children and the burden of excess friends, disposal of family heirlooms in an imagined auction; the over-arching impression is one of challenged contentment, “the dramatics over.” The contentment is tinged here and there with confusion but not with regrets.
If you have lived in the Victoria area most of your life and, in mid-life, enjoy reminiscing, then this blackberry patch is for you. 1-897109-11-3
--review by Hannah Main-Van Der Kamp
Canadian Literature
Terence Young’s second collection of poetry, Moving Day, bears earmarks of both Lamothe and Adams. While Young’s collection is rooted firmly in the recognizable present of Vancouver Island, it warns, like Lamothe, of the danger of forgetting one’s history. Similarly, almost all of Young’s poems are relayed through the dusty lens of re-memory that is reminiscent of Adams.
Young’s subject matter is the usual fodder of poems—youth, aging, marriage, love, regret—and in the hands of a lesser poet, the collection would be banal. Young has a talent for weaving the epic into the everyday; in the opening poem, “Saturday Wine Tour on the E & N,” a bourgeois afternoon becomes a self-effacing reflection on entitlement: “The city conforms, divides itself into triangles along the right- / of-way, which was here first . . . At each vineyard on the circuit, I raise a toast to the past and listen to the pretty speeches of the oenologists . . . I am a / student out on a school field trip waiting for my free sample.” While, in the text’s title poem, the narrator claims that “there was so much to say / that we said nothing, / convinced / as we had been that the Age of Miracles / was over for us,” Young’s latest collection is nothing short of an everyday miracle: a deft rendering of the bittersweet process that is life.
---Erica Wunker, Canadian Literature
Poetry Is Dead
Perhaps it was the prospect of reading a book on the cover of which was the ancient converted barn where I attended one of the most enjoyable parties I’ve been to that enticed me to read Terence Young’s newest book of poetry, Moving Day (Signature Editions, 2006). The party, hosted by the Youngs as a summer celebration for the Victoria School of Writing, featured much revelry, dancing and general merry-making on the squeaky (but sturdy) porch of the 116-year-old-structure as Terence spun records from his extensive collection of classic rock and bubble-gum pop hits—pausing only to waggishly dismiss the tasteless song requests of an increasingly high-spirited literary crowd. If it was a memory that drew me into Moving Day, it was the immense magnitude of the verses inside that held me. Young seems to approach his writing as he approaches life: with generosity of spirit, a powerful sense of humour and a keen eye for observation. The house in this book stands as glorious metaphor for the heart of the family. Never cliché, it is a place where the possibilities of love are “like the sound of a window giving way/under the weight of a shoulder.” Young moves through personal history with the ease of someone flipping thorough the weathered pages of a favorite family photo album, discussing the past and present, but also noting the imminent future, a time when, after all is said and done, “everything will seem too brief.”
--- Leah Rae, Poetry is Dead
Terence Young’s second collection of poetry, Moving Day, bears earmarks of both Lamothe and Adams. While Young’s collection is rooted firmly in the recognizable present of Vancouver Island, it warns, like Lamothe, of the danger of forgetting one’s history. Similarly, almost all of Young’s poems are relayed through the dusty lens of re-memory that is reminiscent of Adams.
Young’s subject matter is the usual fodder of poems—youth, aging, marriage, love, regret—and in the hands of a lesser poet, the collection would be banal. Young has a talent for weaving the epic into the everyday; in the opening poem, “Saturday Wine Tour on the E & N,” a bourgeois afternoon becomes a self-effacing reflection on entitlement: “The city conforms, divides itself into triangles along the right- / of-way, which was here first . . . At each vineyard on the circuit, I raise a toast to the past and listen to the pretty speeches of the oenologists . . . I am a / student out on a school field trip waiting for my free sample.” While, in the text’s title poem, the narrator claims that “there was so much to say / that we said nothing, / convinced / as we had been that the Age of Miracles / was over for us,” Young’s latest collection is nothing short of an everyday miracle: a deft rendering of the bittersweet process that is life.
---Erica Wunker, Canadian Literature
Poetry Is Dead
Perhaps it was the prospect of reading a book on the cover of which was the ancient converted barn where I attended one of the most enjoyable parties I’ve been to that enticed me to read Terence Young’s newest book of poetry, Moving Day (Signature Editions, 2006). The party, hosted by the Youngs as a summer celebration for the Victoria School of Writing, featured much revelry, dancing and general merry-making on the squeaky (but sturdy) porch of the 116-year-old-structure as Terence spun records from his extensive collection of classic rock and bubble-gum pop hits—pausing only to waggishly dismiss the tasteless song requests of an increasingly high-spirited literary crowd. If it was a memory that drew me into Moving Day, it was the immense magnitude of the verses inside that held me. Young seems to approach his writing as he approaches life: with generosity of spirit, a powerful sense of humour and a keen eye for observation. The house in this book stands as glorious metaphor for the heart of the family. Never cliché, it is a place where the possibilities of love are “like the sound of a window giving way/under the weight of a shoulder.” Young moves through personal history with the ease of someone flipping thorough the weathered pages of a favorite family photo album, discussing the past and present, but also noting the imminent future, a time when, after all is said and done, “everything will seem too brief.”
--- Leah Rae, Poetry is Dead
