From Library Journal
Wright is one of those rare and gifted poets who can turn thought into music. Following his self-prescribed regimen of purgatio, illuminato, and contemplatio, Wright spins one lovely lyric after another on such elemental subjects as sky, trees, birds, months, and seasons. But the real subject is the thinking process itself and the mysterious alchemy of language: "The world is a language we never quite understand." But Wright's metaphors are readily grasped: an "epaulet of stars," the "hat/of daylight," the "dead script of vines," an "oil-rag American sky," or "fall's early chemotherapy." The beauty of these poems-with their echoes of Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke-is hard won. Under the joyful act of composition lies "the heart's arctic," and the poet listens closely to "what the darkness says." Each poem celebrates a precious aesthetic fact-"one the in a world of a." Highly recommended for all collections.
Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Wright has always been a storyteller as well as a poet and likes to mix the confidings of a journal with the declarations of a poem. Here, in his eleventh book of poetry, he has stripped down his sometimes garrulous style to a beautiful, trellised simplicity, echoing the grace and restraint of Chinese poetry, an influence he pays homage to as often as he contemplates the Blue Ridge Mountains and the history-strewn landscapes and cityscapes of Italy. This is a reflective collection, a pondering of time and history. Wright poses riddles and koans in the perfectly balanced, yin-yangy poems of the first section, then goes on to playfully animate and personify nature: daylight becomes a wind-driven hat, emerging spring flowers butt their heads against nothingness, and pears hang like "golden hourglasses." He confesses to being "word-drunk" and then worries, "Who listens to anyone?" All is learning only to unlearn; all is emptiness, winter, and memories that "never lie still." And there is a mythical beauty in all these paradoxes, an inevitability that we must convert into peace of mind, peace of soul. Donna Seaman
Review
“In his generation, the generation of Ashbery, Rich, Ammons, Ginsberg, Plath, and Merrill, Wright is perhaps closest to Plath in his intensity of the image, closest to Ammons in his sense of the sidereal. But he sounds like nobody else, and he has remained faithful to insights and intuitions--of darkness as of light--less than common in contemporary America.” ―Helen Vendler, The New Republic
“Chickamauga marks a new turning point in Wright's career . . . Like [Wallace] Stevens's The Rock, Chickamauga is the result of a self-consciously imposed limitation . . . Most of Wright's new poems fit neatly on one page, and, if anything, each poem seems more gorgeous than the one preceding it . . . Wright's turn toward smaller poems is the result of a metaphysical as well as formal dilemma . . . [It] is a beautiful book, bearably human yet in touch with the sublime; I would not want to be deprived of any of its poems. But I can't help wondering what Charles Wright--who must be thought of as one of our living masters--could possibly do next.” ―James Longenbach, The Yale Review
About the Author
Charles Wright is the United States Poet Laureate. His poetry collections include Country Music, Black Zodiac, Chickamauga, Bye-and-Bye: Selected Later Poems, Sestets, and Caribou. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. Born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee in 1935, he currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
