Black Lab

Part faithful Labrador, part laboratory of an ""emotion / so large and mute it has no name,"" this collection, poet and translator Young's 10th, documents a man inching closer to the end of his life with humor, wonder and an impressive lack of self-pity. Much of the humor in these poems comes from a plainspoken exuberance the poet seems to have learned from translating the Chinese poets. In ""Walking Around Retired in Ohio,"" after Lu Ji, Young writes, ""I get up at dawn these days, / ...get up and dress, then hesitate- / there isn't anywhere I have to go!"" These wry moments thread through the book, but the speaker's deeper losses are what provide its center. In a series of dated poems, a father's death, an exploded spacecraft and a long-dead wife provide the occasion to explore what's left when ""the body simplifies to mottled matter."" Young keeps these and other poems' pain at bay with a subtle formal mastery-his modes include the abecedarian ""Gnostic Hymns,"" nursery rhyme, prose and tight-lipped Celanian stanzas. The floundering moments occur when there's not enough humor or formal acuity to frame the plain sentiments expressed, as in ""I Wear My Father,"" a poem in which the speaker sees himself becoming his dead father. When Young is at his best, however, his plainness, after ""giving a little shrug, / then vanishing,"" reveals ""the blue snow moment,"" a sudden beautiful clarity.