Cold Fire

David Mason’s poetry circles the globe. The urgent and beautiful poems of his new book, Cold Fire, have settings in Australia, India, Greece, Turkey and the American West. A title sequence takes up the Aboriginal practice of cool burning for fire mitigation, and moves to the Ring of Fire, the volcanoes of Mason’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest—fires of creation and destruction. Here the dream life of art is pitched against human conflict. Here we have poems of family life, aging, and a deep conversation with history and myth. This is a book of light, love, and powerful remembrance from the edge of the world.

Advanced Praise

“‘Men come to their senses when they learn to sail, a steady hand on the craft,’ writes David Mason. No one has a steadier hand on the craft of poetry than the author of those lines, and no one makes better sense of the world in which we find ourselves. Mason’s poems have from the start dazzled readers with a rare combination of qualities. He has a novelist’s sense of drama and eye for detail, as well as an epigrammatist’s sharp wisdom and gift for memorable phrasing. The tales he tells and songs he sings in Cold Fire glow steadily with that wisdom, which has only grown more luminous over the years, and clarify our own vision, if only for a time: ‘His burning brand / purifies with smoke each blade and twig we see.’”
— Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems

“…manages to convey the tremendous geologic mystery of the whole world, and the smallness of our place within it…”
— Kjerstin Kauffman, Literary Matters

“…Mason encourages us to ponder the meaning of death, or memory, of what happens to what we value most as each beloved person, garden, literature, art, and era dies and is replaced by another.”
— Siham Karami, Los Angeles Review of Books