Additional information
by Webster Young (Author), John Axline (Photographer)
Webster Young's colorful lyric poetry is matched with John Axline's black and white nature photography in this descendant of the photo and poetry classic Not Man Apart (Robinson Jeffers and Ansel Adams). It reflects Webster Young's love of California and its unities of mountain ranges, the Pacific Coast, its chain of missions, its magnificent aqueduct and agriculture, and its system of universities from North to South. One of the longer poems is entitled "The Career of Ansel Adams." The New Mexico section matches stunning photos of Santa Fe, the desert, and the Sangre de Cristo mountains with intense poems reflecting the poet's ten years living in Cerillos, New Mexico. Young's poetry is lyrical, using lines of various meters and all types of rhyme in a non-conventional scheme. Axline's photos are in the classical tradition of Ansel Adams, yet also have a slightly new slant, within a solid photographic composition, to capture characteristic landscape details and points.
Author Biography
Webster Young has been a journalist on music and culture for newspapers and journals, including Newsday and the National Catholic Register. Young has been a candidate for Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. His stories for ballet and lyrics for opera have been performed on musical theater stages. His family is related to the essential Broadway playwright and lyricist, Otto Harbach, who wrote "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Young was raised in New York City and has lived in California and New Mexico. He first excelled at writing poetry at age 11 and received a literary award from the DAR a year later. At age 16, his poems published in the Deerfield Journal earned him a place in the English literature class of Robert McGlynn (teacher and inspirer of John McPhee). While at the University of California in the 1960s and 70s, Young's artistic mentor was a close friend of the Catholic poet Brother Antoninus (William Everson).
John Axline is a documentary and ballet filmmaker (Two for Ballet [PBS], The Swan Lake Story [Disney], and 6000 Miles to Ukraine). Like Webster Young, he has lived in California and New Mexico and has much the same feeling as the poet for these states.
