![[logo] Crest of the University of Wisconsin-Madison](/images/crest.png)
![[logo] Ask a Librarian](/images/ask.png)
« Back to All News Releases
"Bird of Paradise," newly published by Parallel Press
Posted 2/10/2012
MADISON, Wis. - Parallel Press, the publishing imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, is pleased to announce the publication of a new poetry chapbook, Bird of Paradise by George Young.
Bird of Paradise is a poetry collection about birds: the urge to watch them through binoculars and to find their pictures and names in a field guide, the urge to describe them in poetry.
For Mr. Young, “birds represent the mysterious ‘other,’ inhabiting an alternate universe invisible to most of us until we look for it. Their existence on this earth is bound up with mine.”
The lines in Mr. Young’s poems dance and flutter across the pages, not unlike the avian subjects of his poetry. From “The Others”: “In the interstices of our world / (vacant lots, ditch-banks, the sad elms / in cemeteries) / they flit / and flicker, search for their spider eggs, / their wild grass seeds. / They are here!”
Poetry and bird life are interconnected, inseparable. From “Wings”: “A poem is not a bird until it flies in the mind.”
George Young is a retired physician living in Boulder, Colorado. His first book of poems, Spinoza’s Mouse, won the Washington Prize and was published by Word Works. He had one other chapbook of poems, Creating the Universe, published by Perivale Press and has been in a number of anthologies of poetry by physicians: Uncharted Lines, Blood and Bone, and Primary Care: More Poems by Physicians; as well as two other anthologies: Winners: A Retrospective of the Washington Prize, and Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams.
To order this or any other Parallel Press poetry chapbook, visit the Press' ordering page.
