 Black Dionysus. I've been reading Al Young's luminous poetry for a generation. Like Ray Childs, I've been blind all my life with eyes wide open. And like Ray Childs, Al Young's been no less Homeric for our time. The moon alphabets all over the sky of his sounds and his writings. And what a revelation it is, seeing the darkness empty itself in Al Young's sibilant sea of light, where the humble and the humbling laureate of the most sensitively resistant state against the trumpery of racist con men and thuggery, floods of feelings with the visionary insights of the black Dionysus of the poem.