Pacific Light – David Mason
Pacific Light
David Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet “at the height of his powers”. Here is a 23-minute film about Pacific Light: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdEgyglA6a0
About the author
David Mason was born in Bellingham, Washington, and has lived in many parts of the world. He served four years as poet laureate of Colorado before moving to Tasmania in 2018. His many books include The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), Ludlow: A Verse Novel (winner of the Colorado Book Award), The Sound: New and Selected Poems and Pacific Light. Mason has also written four books of essays and co-edited several textbooks and anthologies. His work can be found in The New Yorker, The Weekend Australian, The Australian Book Review, Poetry, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The Hudson Review, The Nation, and many other periodicals. His libretti for operas by composers Lori Laitman and Tom Cipullo are all available on CD from Naxos. Mason’s website can be found at https://davidmasonpoet.com