Beloved Infidel

Dean Young's poetry book "Beloved Infidel" seeks truth in the strangest places, like the men's restroom. The poems in this book are both witty and poignant. It is a good collection to begin with if you are not familiar with Young's writing because it is essentially his first book of poems where as he states on the back of the book" I really think of it as my first because it's in this book that I felt like I was throwing off my (perfectly good) education and beginning to write the poems I didn't know how to write."You will get an idea of how his writing style began. You will find yourself reevaluating what poetry can be. He uses strong images and tone to bring the reader closer to what he is trying to say about life. One of the best things about his poetry is how he ties an ordinary thing like "rain filling a crack" or a situation where "I didn't know how alone I was until they brought out more chairs" to create a building of emotional exigency. It is these things he highlights in the poem that make the reader see the greater picture he is trying to paint about life.This book contains a lot of poems about the dynamics between men and women like "Marriage" and " What Does Us In." In his poem "Shades" he writes about the difficulty of helping a friend deal with his wife's suicide in a very tender way. This tenderness is also revealed in "Another Ocean" and "The Soul" where he discusses watching his friend deal with a deadly illness. He also has some very erotic poems like "Storms" and "The First Time & The Time Before That" that show the vast contrast between two inexperienced lovers and two people that have many dynamics in their sexual relationship.When you read this book it will make you examine how you see the relationships in your own life and whether you notice the things that make them special. Young's ability to make the reader aware in an understated way by throwing a surprising detail in the middle of the poem is what makes reading his poems so exciting. His poems are sewn together by their tone which is created by tender language or brash language and images of things in life we don't often focus on.Young uses a lot of association in his poems and strengthens the connections with parallelism. A good example of this is found in his poem "The Fine Arts" where he uses the different pieces of art in his life to describe the stages of a relationship. He uses the art as the object of parallelism with pieces by Bonnard, a table, and a Chagall painting. Dean Young's poetic voice is distinctive and unpretentious which is highly appealing because he is not afraid to admit he doesn't have all the answers. His questioning makes the reader feel like she isn't the only one bumbling around trying to figure out this life.