Earthshine is a book about a wife's illness and death from cancer and the aftermath of grief. It is, necessarily, painful. Yet David Young, is meditating on despair and the loss of love, has found the "day coming up again, the world enacting its own beginnings and everything moving in this earthshine." The clouds and mountains still glisten. The earth is "a crystal where light is sorted and stored," a "tiny beacon in the hurting dark."
But before new light is the dark, and David Young leads the way through the dark carefully, gently, in restrained yet penetrating words, from the shock of discovery ("the first death") to surgery, liver scans, the rude details of disease, the tightening circle of pain, the dwindling body, the spreading sorrow. Then, the search for light--at first there comes "an afterglow of love," then misery starts "to slip away" and a sky displays a blue radiance. "The tears that filled me up fill with light now."
- ISBN10 0819521477
- ISBN13 9780819521477
- Publish Date April 1988 (first published 15 February 1988)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 12 February 1993
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Wesleyan
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 72
- Language English