rev. of Beloved Infidel by Dean Young

Beloved Infidel 
Poems by Dean Young. Wesleyan University Press, $10.95
paper. Reviewed by Diann Blakely Shoaf.

In “The Hive,” as in many other of the very fine poems in Dean Young’s second collection,
Beloved Infidel, the slightly cracked and wavy but nonetheless serviceable mirror of contemporary language is held up to our lives, to the thrusts and parries that characterize what is perhaps our age’s central obsession: relationships. “None of us are to blame,” Young writes, “sitting on the porch, smoking, quitting smoking, / talking about our backs, Italy, finishing / the book on Gertrude Stein, betrayals, talking / about shoes and how we want what everyone wants: / complete devotion and to be left the hell alone.” Young’s gift for the universal and seemingly irrefutable statement is also felt, as the title perhaps indicates, in “On Being Asked by a Student If He Should Ask Out Some Girl,” another of the volume’s brightest stars.

The quirky, conversational, self-mocking, and achingly human voice here is well-modulated through the book’s four sections. Young plummets into undeniable despair — though always with a kind of stoic humor — in poems like “Shades,” where a friend tells him of his lover’s suicide. “What can I say,” Young asks himself, “that isn’t a contrivance of keening and / projection? How twice a woman I once loved / told me gently, almost politely, / sometimes she wishes me dead?” Yet the same section includes a poem Young is able to title, with a straight face, “Pleasure”; he argues for its place in lives carried out in the country that invented the Protestant ethic, its workaholics now laboring in the post-yuppie era. Young’s argument is put forth for an entirely unfrivolous reason, one carrying the weight of a moral imperative: “There must be an aesthetic not based on death.” In these funny, poignant, spikily intelligent, and unnervingly wise poems, Young makes a real winner of a case for this credo. And in the
process, makes a book that’s a winner of hearts as well.

Diann Blakely Shoaf ‘s first book of poems, Hurricane Walk,
was published last year by BOA Editions. She teaches at the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville.