Poet, essayist, and librettist David Mason grew up in Washington State, worked for many years in Colorado (where he became the state’s poet laureate) and a couple of years ago moved to Tasmania. Pacific Light, his new collection, is largely about that transition and his getting to know the landscapes and cultures of his new country.
While Mason is to be welcomed as an Australian poet (the acknowledgments here feature several Australian publications, including Australian Book Review), he is still very much an American poet, an heir to the great tradition of modern American poetry beginning with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, going on to flourish between the wars and through to the 1970s. To those who know and love that tradition (including this reviewer), it’s a great pleasure to feel some, if not all, of those poets continuing, in a sense, to speak through him – despite Mason’s clear originality.