Poet Dean Young has dealt with impermanence( )a lot in his career, but it's a particularly strong theme in Young's latest collection, Fall Higher.The new collection was published in April, just days after the poet received a life-saving heart transplant   after about a decade of living with a weakening heart condition. Young, whose work is often frank and rich with twisted humor, tells NPR's Renee Montaigne that as he recovers from operation, he's also slowly returning to his everyday writing habits. "I'm getting back to it," Young says."Not with the sort of concentration and sort of flame that I look forward to in the future, but I am blackening some pages." And on those blackened pages you'll find poems like " How Grasp Green," which carries themes of springtime and rebirth.It's one of the first poems Young has written since his transplant. It's easy to spot clues   to Young's awful health situation in the lines of his poetry. Fall Higher's "Vintage" opens with, "Because I will die soon, I fall asleep, during the lecture on the ongoing emergency." And the poem "-The Rhythms Pronounce Themselves Then Vanish--published in The /Vew Barker in February --opens with the CT scan that revealed Young's heart condition. Young says "Rhythms" was written about the beginning of his illness. "I had been having a lot of physical pain so that I could hardly walk a block.I got sent to a gastroenterologist and he did a series of tests, and then the tests came back to me and it was all heart related," he says." And the outlook wasn't good. Hearts tend to come up a lot in poetry, and that's especially true of Young's work, which has clearly been influenced by the troubles of his own heart, "A lot of times, it's not just a metaphor   ," Young says."For me, it's an actual concern because I've been living with this disease for over 10 years.My father died of heart problems when he was 49, so it's been a sort of shadowy concern for me my whole life. But Young's poems also deal with more abstract matters of the heart.He wrote Fall Higher's, "Late Valentine" for his wife."We've been married since late November and most of it has been spent in the hospital," Young says of his marriage to poet Laurie Saurborn Young, who says " 'Late Valentine' is very sweet. Today, Young says, his friends can't help but comment on how pink his cheeks have become--the result of a new heart and better circulation  .But Young wrote the poems of Fall Higher before the transplant, at a time when, at its weakest point, his old heart was pumping at 8 percent of what it should have been. He was staring death in the face--but he was still able to look at his life and see art in it. Young's work also touches on themes of randomness and fate --two factors that contributed to him getting a second chance in the form of a new heart from a 22-year-old student. "Everything in life is molecules   bouncing against molecules," Young says, and having a successful transplant is no different." Somebody had to die; it had to be a fit; my blood and his blood had to not have an argument; the heart had to be transported; I had to get it." There were, in short, an amazing number of variables   that led to Young being here today. "I just feel enormous gratitude," he says of his donor  ."He gave me a heart so I'm still alive-"I'm sure I'm going to think about this person for the rest of my life." The poetry collection Fall Higher   _  .
was published in February refers darkness as its main theme is Young's latest collection of poetry was written after Young's heart transplant