"A poet known for his narratives, like Ludlow, the acclaimed historical-novel-in-verse turned opera, David Mason curates the archipelago of intensely satisfying lyric poems in Pacific Light with the skill of a consummate storyteller." —Siham Karami, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Mason is a poet defined by place, if it is Southeast Asia on the Pacific Rim or Northwest America, his poems breathe life of the people around him as well as the nature he observes and partakes in." —g emil reutter, North of Oxford
“With narrative clarity, . . . the poet manages to convey the tremulous geologic mystery of the whole world, and the smallness of our place within it. . . . Pacific Light is saturated with a lifetime’s worth of reflection, and mature and complex in its expression.”—Kjerstin Kauffman, Literary Matters
“Pacific Light may be a summing up, but it is also a new beginning, a book that marvels at the world while confronting loss through the lens of joy. Though individually dazzling, its poems combine to stunning effect, equaling—or even surpassing—the very best in Mason’s superb body of work.” —Ned Balbo, Think Journal
The sonic pleasures of David Mason’s Pacific Light carried me swiftly through this stunningly crafted collection. Each poem is at its best read aloud, the accomplished rhythms emerging as a lilt and ease, a physical pleasure of the human mouth and lungs. These stories, meditations, monologues, and love songs slowly develop an expansive vision of the natural world in which the speaker is observer and participant, a brushstroke in the painting, forever in relationship to memory, to history, and to the Earth. What emerges across these poems is a full life lived in communion; what emerges across these poems is wisdom. —Jason Schneiderman, author of Hold Me Tight
As a poet of America’s Pacific Northwest, David Mason has found its mirror reflection in Australia’s Southeast. Turned upside down by love, he has learned “to walk upright under the Southern Cross.” Generously, he extends his feeling of renewal to all of us and urges us “to let all discovery / teach us to love the globe, that troubled child.” In Pacific Light, David Mason, one of our indispensable poets, shares his discovery of a new world—and amazingly, it turns out to be this one. —Mark Jarman, author of Dailiness and The Heronry
In the last stanza of the last poem in David Mason’s startling and soulful new book of poems, Pacific Light, the poet writes:
The effort of a life, the wasted hour,
the kind word given to a stranger’s child are understood as kin and disappear.
Time to be grass again. Ongoing. Wild.
This stanza testifies to last things: the last journey, the last shape shifting, the last immigration in a book filled with such arrivals and departures. The formal rigor of the poems—handled with an easy and almost offhand poise—only accentuates the sense of almost constant movement, which is at the heart of the book. This book is the story of a life's deepening and reconfiguration. As such, it both inspires and challenges the reader in ways that only poetry can do. What a pleasure to read a book of poems by a poet at the height of his powers, a poet whose life has been transformed and whose poems are the embodiment of that transformation. —Jim Moore, author of Underground: New and Selected Poems
"It’s not a simple book celebrating his new home; nor is it a book of nostalgia. Pacific Light encompasses the full reach of a life well lived, by any definition." —Geoff Page, Australian Book Review
David Mason wrote for LARB
David Mason wrote for The Woven Table
"In Pacific Light, his newest volume of poems, David Mason proves again that he is a poet whose roots are deep in the mountains and oceans and the time—present, past, and future—they contain. Many of these poems find a way to know a day placed solidly in the present, only to then remember, again, that there is no present. That there is no life or object, regardless of age or apparent sturdiness, that isn't being measured in moments" —John Riley, Červená Barva Press
"A Strong poetic sensibility is combine with a successful conventional style in several insightful accounts of familiar situations, like seeing people in airports that one thinks one knows ('Long Haul'), the art of learning 'to do almost nothing' after an incapacitation ('Letter to my Right Foot'), and the way a holiday can open one's eyes to the relative stressfulness of one's everyday life ('Barra de Potosi'). The collection's thematic range renders it unsurprising that Mason is 'never, / not even by nothing, bored' (Strange Creature That I Am'), while one wishes one could easily follow his advice in 'A Word':" — Tim Murphy, Review 31
"The resolute tone of the skin-shedder – at once valedictory and inaugural – runs through the volume, dramatizing the poet’s renewal."
—Jaya Savige, Times Literary Supplement
