“The voice is assured, the poet confident and skilled; none of the considerable technique exceeds the grasp. Yet the writing is playful and full of delightful surprises, too.”

— Books in Canada

“This West Coast poet is most interesting when he verges into daydream and fantasy, and becomes imagistically venturesome.”

— The Globe & Mail

“The poems in this collection both resonate with depth and reach for the stars.”

— The Danforth Review

“If in fact some of these poems take two or three readings to yield their full meaning, that is all to the good, for Young is a mature poet whose intelligence and insights one can trust.”

— Canadian Literature

“The lyric voice is the first voice of poetry, yet the hardest to define. We memorialize, confirm and reassure ourselves; we write poems that present a sometimes sideways logic or attitude intended for the consumption and assimilation of others. To be better, more critically astute scientists, we leave behind personal preoccupations for larger communcal or societal contentions.

This does not explain why the lyrics voice is the most generally attractive. Lyric voice is not wholly interior; even when a poem may be explicitly about the details of the author, that experience is somehow dissimulated. It is unrecognizable to the writer, surprising, even foreign.

In this vein, Terence Young's Moving Day has its own particular attitude. The circumstances of events feel familiar, as if they come from the experience of the author himself.

Inside everything that is familiar, however it may flirt with the trap of cliché, there is an advantage of an inherent symbolic organization. When the poetry is uncovered the results are devastating and magical to the reader. The rule often is, the simpler the language the harder poetry hits:

You think you can predict the form
your journey will take,
how the past will appear to you,
a dream you will one day learn
to summon at will.

There are surprises — the surprise of assuming a different identity that the one we know, of owning what is different than ourselves:

Winter's back, as ugly as the woman I sleep with.
Another four months pulling myself around
in the dark, guessing at scars that brush
my lips. The season of trains,
of lines in general.

Ironically, this transformation serves as a buffer, which we use to protect ourselves, to give us the ability to be more 'honest' when the times is right. Where what seems like nothing more that a mess of words can be endowed with great sudden meaning.

In intimate poems like 'My Young Wife One Confessed' and 'The Benediction,' there is a migration or a leaving behind and an effort to absolve or clear house before the big 'moving day.' That 'moving day' is a time of new meaning or new poetic philosophy:

Tom and I are walking to the corner store
for licorice
when Gary Prescott blocks our path and
tells us to get down on our knees.
He is two grades ahead of us,
already shaving and hair like a rain cloud.
We are to tell him that our mothers
have sex with each other,
that our fathers lick our sisters like dogs.
I know nothing
about the past, about what is rare and
what is commonplace.
Everything, even cruelty, is
a mystery I am willing to learn.

What do we leave behind? What do we hold onto? And how do we move ahead? These various states of being direct Young's division of labour: 'When You Become Young Again,' 'Hostages' and 'Brave.' They make Young's collection a complete work, one almost devoid of pretension, deft in movement, full of passion, a passion to remain homegrown and refuse to indulge in rhetoric. Young is already on the quest for a pure Canadian poetry.”

— Event, The Douglas College Review

“The cover of Terence Young's new book of poetry, Moving Day, features a photograph of a 116-year-old converted barn, where I once attended an enjoyable party. The party, hosted by hte Youngs as a celebration for the Victoria School of Writing, featured much revelry, dancing, and general merrymaking on the ancient, squeaky but sturdy porch of the structure as Young spun records from his extensive collection of classic rock and bublegum pop hits, pausing only to dismiss the tasteless musical requests of the high-spirited literary crowd. If it was a memory that drew me into Moving Day, it was th extraordinary magnitude of the verses inside that held me. Young approaches life with generosity of spirit, a powerful sense of humour and a keen eye. The house in this book stands as glorious metaphor for teh heart of the family, but never becomes a cliche: it is a plae where the possibilities of love are "like the sound of a window giving way/under the weight of a shoulder." Young moves through personal history with the ease of someone flipping through teh weathered pagesof a family photo album, discussing the past and present but also noting the near future, a time when, after all is said and done, "everything will seem too brief."”

— Leah Rae Geist 64