David Young, the distinguished poet and translator, offers us a gorgeous cycle of poems attuned to the Midwestern seasonsto weather both emotional and actual. A writer of thrilling invention and humanity, Young beckons the reader into an effortless proximity with the fox at the fields edge, with the chattering crow and the startling first daffodils of spring. In his tour of both exterior and interior landscapes, the poet scatters his fathers ashes and remembers losing his wife, Chloe, to cancer, a loss at times still fresh after several decades; pays homage to the wisdom of the Chinese masters whose aesthetic has helped shape his own; and reflects on the gladdening qualities of a walk in a snowstorm with his black labrador, Nemo: and in this snowfall that I should detest,late March and early April, Im still raptto see his coat so constellated, starred, re-starred,making a comic cosmos I can love.Youngs expert shaping of this world in which, as he writes, Were never going to get God right. But we / learn to love all our failures on the way, becomes for the reader a fresh experience of lifes mysterious goodness and of the abundant pleasure of the language that embodies it.From the Trade Paperback edition.