David Mason poet

David Mason believes in literature as a weather event – even an extreme one. He reads to be changed – drenched, burned, blown away. He has no wish to have his standing position confirmed, and is alert to the ways in which his subjects are changed, both by their writing and its reception.
– James Campbell, author of Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin

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As a poet of America’s 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 ‘to let all discovery / teach us to love the globe, that troubled child.’
– Mark Jarman, author of Dailiness and The Heronry

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▶ Read a review of Pacific Light by Siham Karami in Los Angeles Review of Books.

David Mason delivers a stunning collection that places him in a unique position in American letters. With language both simple and elegant, comprehending deeply if not always comfortably the human landscape, and finding solace in the natural world, his lines remind us that pathos lies alongside humor, that profound moments are often merely a glance away, that new possibilities in the business of living arise for those bold enough to seek them.
– Jeffrey Lent, author of A Slant of Light

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Celebrated poet David Mason explores surprising connections in geography and time, considering writers who traveled, who emigrated or were exiled, and who often shaped the literature of their homelands. He writes of seasoned travelers (Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Joseph Conrad, Herodotus himself), and writers as far flung as Omar Khayyam, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, James Joyce, and Les Murray. In the end, he turns to his own native region, the American West, with Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, Robinson Jeffers, Belle Turnbull, and Thomas McGrath.
– Amazon

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Sometimes, it’s in the landscape of grief that the soul is most unmoored. This tender and breathtaking child’s poem – the story of a boy who mourns his mother’s death, told in aching verse by the former poet laureate of Colorado – might illuminate a way toward healing.
– Chicago Tribune

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In these poems of loss, discovery and love, David Mason delivers a stunning collection that places him in a unique position in American letters. With language both simple and elegant, comprehending deeply if not always comfortably the human landscape, and finding solace in the natural world… In his embrace of tradition Mason transforms and ultimately transcends the form, making it wholly his own. A masterful poet, apart from the crowd.
– Jeffrey Lent

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David Mason’s beautiful verse adaptation of Hawthorne’s classic novel, The Scarlet Letter, astutely portrays its characters amid the Puritan society of 17th-century New England. My music – lyrically expressive and intricately orchestrated – dramatizes the psychological underpinnings of this story. Though Hester is shamed for adultery, her steadfast strength of character reveals a true moral sense, while the weaknesses of both her lover and estranged husband ultimately yield their self-destruction.
– composer Lori Laitman courtesy Naxos

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Ludlow tells the story of a handful of immigrants – Greek, Mexican, Scottish, Italian – in southern Colorado, climaxing in the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914, in which elements of the Colorado National Guard killed striking miners and family members. [It’s] a searing story told with great art, and a major contribution to the literature of the American West.
– Red Hen Press

Ludlow was named by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum named as the best poetry book of 2007. As union membership continues to decline in this country and long-term unemployment remains high, Ludlow is a harrowing reminder of a time when ordinary workers had no rights at all.
– Ron Charles, Washington Post

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