Poet Dean Young has dealt with impermanence (无常) a lot in his career, but it’s a particularly strong theme in Young’s latest collection, Fall Higher. The new collection was published in April, just days after the poet received a life-saving heart transplant (移植) after about a decade of living with a weakening heart condition. Young, whose work is often frank and rich with twisted humor, tells NPR’s Renee Montagne that as he recovers from operation, he’s also slowly returning to his everyday writing habits. “I’m getting back to it,” Young says, “not with the sort of concentration and sort of flame that I look forward to in the future, but I am blackening some pages.” And on those blackened pages you’ll find poems like “How Grasp Green”, which carries themes of springtime and rebirth. It’s one of the first poems Young has written since his transplant. It’s easy to spot clues (线索) to Young’s awful health situation in the lines of his poetry. Fall Higher’s “Vintage” opens with “Because I will die soon, I fall asleep, during the lecture on the ongoing emergency.” And the poem “The Rhythms Pronounce Themselves Then Vanish”—published in The New Yorker in February—opens with the CT scan that revealed Young’s heart condition. Hearts tend to come up a lot in poetry, and that’s especially true if Young’s work, which has clearly been influenced by the troubles of his own heart. “A lot of times, it’s not just a metaphor (暗喻),” Young says. “For me, it’s an actual concern because I’ve been living with this disease for over 10 years. My father died of heart problems when he was 49, so it’s been a sort of shadowy concern for me my whole life. But Young’s poems also deal with more abstract matters of the heart. He wrote Fall Higher’s, “Late Valentine” for his wife. “We’ve been married since late November and most of it has been spent in the hospital,” Young says of his marriage to poet Laurie Saurborn Young, who says “‘Late Valentine’ is very sweet.” His work also touches on themes of randomness and fate—two factors that contributed to him getting a second chance in the form of transplanting a new heart from a 22-year-old student. “I just feel enormous gratitude,” he says of his donor (捐献者). “He gave me a heart so I’m still alive … I’m sure I’m going to think about this person for the rest of my life.” 小题1:The poetry collection Fall Higher .
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