Charles Wright (1)Reviews

I just couldn't get into this one, and found myself skimming and finally dropping it altogether. I've never read anything by Charles Wright, and for how lauded he seems to be perhaps this was the wrong collection to start with. Or perhaps his style is just not for me.

I'm not sure every poem was written when he was older, but the collection was released in his old age and it feels like each piece reflects this: onset of night, dusk, changing seasons, darkness, winter, reflection on lessons learned/not learned, etc. It becomes quite repetitive very quickly. While I appreciate some of the sentiments and I enjoy the focus on natural world, overall I found myself lost in phrasing that didn't make sense, bored, and desiring something more nuanced.

Buffalo Yoga by Charles Wright (one of my favorite poets) is a slow, articulation of trials and hand-spun musicology. Buffalo Yoga grapples and plies with new mythos and earns its place in the pantheon of rarely mentioned, towering poetry collections. We see this collection as a momento mori of passing thought and space. This book is one of Wright’s lesser known collections but well worth the read.

Wright's poems are the kind which you might read through once, fairly easily, and then read through again for another level of meaning. In this collection, the ones I got the most out of were the longer sequences and those more focused on images than on story-telling, which isn't necessarily the norm for me. Here, though, the sequences progressed in such a way as to feel like slowly blooming flowers and films, and I adored them, whereas many images were offered with such simple flavor that I couldn't help but enjoy them and re-read immediately.

Wright will probably never be one of my favorite poets, but this little book is certainly my favorite collection from him so far, and I think I'll probably return to a number of the poems here.½

To me, these poems read like salt water. Some are nightswimming in the briny, dark, endless Atlantic, fathoms unknown beneath my treading feet. Others the taste of tears on my lips, breeze a delicate finger against the glaze of water on my cheeks. And a handful are the salty-sweet strangeness of salt water taffy. All lovely, all words worth savoring a spell.

Great selections by Charles Wright, with some particularly good work from Louise Glück, Robert Hass, W. S. Merwin, and C. K. Williams. As far as collections, this is one of the better ones.½

Desire discriminates and language discriminates:
They form no part of the essence of things:
each word
Is a failure, each object
We name and place
leads us another step away from the light.

Loss is its own gain.
Its secret is emptiness.
Our images lie in the flat pools of their dark selves
Like bodies of water the tide moves.
They move as the tide moves.
Its secret is emptiness.

A great collection of work by an underrated poet. In Wright's poetry, Paul Celan, Du Fu, and Dante meet and discuss the Appalachians. This kaleidoscopic conversation is nowhere more evident than the selections from Chickamauga—which, for me, are the strongest.

I used to imagine that word-sway and word-thunder
Would silence the Silence and all that,
That words were the Word,
That language could lead us inexplicably to grace,
As though it were geographical.
I used to think these things when I was young.
I still do.

I didn't care for the early sections, the winnowed caprice of Black Zodiac wasn't as present, filtered. The author's arc of memory and nature's symphony kept my attention. There was an ultimate reward.

A vision of Kafka, one who is offered soft cheese and bread and then leaves as a spring sunbeam is an arresting image. The Carter Family as memento mori. Dr. Burton would be content. Each image offers an idea or an association. Wright measures mortality in a veritable book of snow. Each step ephemeral.

That fire’s the light our names are carved in.

Ultimately fatigue triumphed over delight.
I sorely need to reread the concluding third of this book as my eyes burned from a forced march of a day. The poet is not to blame. There is a just a desire, a hope to make things better.

The language in this tome is precisely jagged. There are exquisite images here this collection, ones as rapturous as the wounds of Saint Sebastian as evocative as the arc light craters outside Phnom Penh.

Everyone indulge and expiate.

Charles Wright is a spiritual poet who questions everything including his questions. He is a poet of nature who suspects that nature has a trick up her sleeve. Landscape and language interplay and he asks much of both, received much, but never enough.

In this collection, he reads from an imagined "Appalachian Book of the Dead" and takes us deep into wonder, and fear, and hope, and resignation, "Until there is nothing else" but silence.

Charles Wright's Buffalo Yoga poems contain no buffaloes, but do interweave personal memories with the natural world, history and biography.

"Everything's more essential in norther light, horses/Lie down in the dry meadow,/Clouds trail, like prairie schooners..."

And the losses of the past are like the absence of buffalo from a plain.

"Thus do we take our deaths up on our shoulders and walk and walk,/ Trying to get back

Wright's prosy and natural style still has a subtle eloquence, and only falters a bit in the latter third of the collection. But it is a worth collection, accessible, yet deep.

A first-rate collection by Charles Wright. Wright's poetry is spiritual without being self-righteous or self-indulgent.

"When he lies down, the waters will lie down with him,
And all that walks and all that stands still, and sleep through the thunder."

He is true to nature's imagery but also is comfortable signifying through and by that imagery.

"Don’t wait for the snowfall from the dogwood tree.
Live like a huge rock covered with moss,
Rooted half under the earth and anxious for no one."

He is not afraid of simplicity or of eloquence:

"Home is what you lie in, or hang above, the house
Your father made, or keeps on making,
The dirt you moisten, the sap you push up and nourish"

I enjoyed living some of my days reading this collection.

This is a lovely books a artifact, which may become more the way of things to come as eBooks take over the basic function of texts. The juxtaposition of black and white art with Wright's sestets, the latter captured from his original typewritten manuscripts including smudged keystrokes, makes for an aesthetically pleasing art work.

And further, Wright's poetry is real, rich in imagery, and fine in word choice, with a sense of form and willingness to play freely against that form.

This 2006 collection by Charles Wright describes the "scar tissue" of living and of nostalgia for real or imagined better times. Wright is not a "nature poet" so much as a philosophical one as Coleridge described Wordsworth, one who uses his relationship with nature to explore and expose life's challenge of finding meaning. The experience of sunset becomes an analogy for human biography:

"If night is our last address
This is the pace we moved from,
Backs on fire, our futures hard-edged and sure to arrive....

"And where are we headed for?
The country of Narrative, that dark territory
Which spells out our stories in sentences, which gives them an end and beginning..."

Wright's poetry challenges us---not with obscurity or experimental language, but with living fully awake and aware, where "Something unordinary persists,/ Something unstill, neversleeping, just possible past reason."

The time spent being so challenged is well worth it.

I don't read a lot of poetry, and this set didn't especially appeal to me. I thought the focus would be more place-based and in Appalachia, but then again, I don't know anything about Charles Wright. The poems grew stronger as I progressed through the book, and there were a few gems, but overall I wasn't particularly affected.

Charles Wright's poems about Appalachia focus mainly on the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. A few poems in the collection are set in other locations around the world such as Italy. The book contains many references to the poet's well-known poem "The Appalachian Book of the Dead." It is not included in the small volume but five sequel poems and numerous references to the original poem are scattered through its pages. This is the final volume in the author's apparently unnamed trilogy. (Chickamauga and Black Zodiac are the earlier volumes.) Most of the poems included did little to make me appreciate them overall. I did appreciate a few lines here and there. His quotation of an old spiritual in one of the sequels to "The Appalachian Book of the Dead" brought back memories of hearing a favorite Southern Gospel quartet sing it about forty-five to fifty years ago.

Why isn't Charles Wright's name on the lips of everyone who cares about language and being and the world? His poetry embodies immanence. It's a perpetual challenge, and I welcome its demands and delights.

Fairly unexciting collection. Nothing particularly objectionable, but few poems that really ride their own melting, as Frost would have them do. Which is disappointing, as I really love Charles Wright's poetry (wonderful introduction, though). Favourites: 'Threshing' (Louise Glück), 'The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus by Castor and Pollux' (Richard Howard), 'Of Love and Other Disasters' (Philip Levine), 'Hexagon: On Truth' (Dave Snyder), 'Language exists because...' (Lynn Xu), 'Book of Hours' (Kevin Young).

More fluid and cyclic than other work I've read by Wright, these poems may not be for fans of Wright's earlier work, but I'd say they're more accessible and enjoyable for the average poetry reader (well, if such a thing exists). The poems mingle ideas of memory and scarring with lasting images, Wright's language so evocative that some of the poems are nearly unforgettable, and beg for rereading. There were many poems here that stalled my reading, forcing me to linger, and in the end I have to say that this feels the most polished and rawly emotional of what I've read from Wright....and I loved every moment of it. Absolutely recommended.

This book is a collection of four of Wright's poetry books, written between 1980 and 1990. Wright is a past winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, so as you might imagine, this is a nicely written collection. Wright's poems explore memory, language, death, time, seasons, nature, and all that good poetic stuff, but they are firmly rooted in experience, his personal past, and the geography and natural beauty of the places that surround him. Most of the poems are two or three pages long, although some are as short as half a page, and a few are much longer -- including a forty-page journey through a single year. While the themes and style are consistent across the collection, we still see Wright change his focus and play with different tones and formats as the collection progresses.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2011/03/world-of-ten-thousand-things-poems-1980.ht... ]

A publisher sent me this book for some reason – perhaps he or she had my address and some empty envelopes and nothing to do on a quiet afternoon. I am ambivalent about Charles Wright. Sometimes I like his poems – quite a few in this collection actually – and sometimes I like them until the end. These poems have a discordant, unexpected twist at the end that jars my vision of the poem. He probably intends that reaction in a reader. Twists and turns inhabit the ends of many, many poems, and I don’t mind those. Wright’s just happen to cross over the line. For example, here is “‘Well, Get up Rounder, Let a Working Man Lay Down’” [Note: structure lost in transference to LT]

The kingdom of minutiae,
that tight place where the most of us live,
Is the kingdom of the saved,
Those who exist between the cracks,
those just under the details.

When the hand comes down, the wing-white hand,
We are the heads of hair
and finger bones yanked out of their shoes,
We are the Rapture’s children. (19)

If this doesn’t make sense to you, that’s poetry. I can only suggest each reader must decide for him or herself. Here’s a poem – my favorite in this collection – that is perfect and complete in my view, “‘It’s Sweet to Be Remembered’”:

No one’s remembered much longer than a rock
is remembered beside the road
If he’s lucky or
Some tune or harsh word
uttered in childhood or back in the day.

Still how nice to imagine some kid someday
picking that rock up and holding it in his hand
Briefly before he chucks it
Deep in the woods in a sunny spot in the tall grass. (32)

How many times have I picked up random stones and tossed them into the woods, a ravine, a lake, a stream, or the ocean? Have I altered the course of history? Have I ever so slightly unbalanced the delicate scales of existence? This is what I love about poetry -- the images, the memories, the connections to my own existence. 4 stars

--Jim, 12/20/2010 (The Winter Solstice)

This is one of the few poetry books I still read; each poem triggers something different with each reading. Wright possesses a great ability to interpose landscape with memory.

I like Charles Wright's ambition to try something new and vastly different than he's done before, but it doesn't _feel_ any newer. In fact, it feels old and for the most part, tired. LITTLEFOOT remains his best work in recent years.

Is this my least favorite best American poetry collection? Yes, I think it is. I was pretty sure I’d not take to this collection when I saw the name of the editor; I’m not a big fan of Charles Wright. The vast majority of the poems struck a Hemingway-esque note with me, a macho man trying to make it in this kinder, gentler world. But here and there, I found a common spirit. How can I read fifty poems and not find a few that light up my heart?! Impossible.

I like reading The Best American Poetry series as it exposes me to poetry that I probably would not encounter on my own. This year, I especially enjoyed “Wanting Sumptuous Heavens,” by Robert Bly and “The Aurora of the New Mind,” by David St. John. I felt that “Divide and Conquer” by Alan Sullivan and “The Dead from Iraq” by David Young were both particular relevant to today’s audience.

Lots of pretty images and not a whole lot else. Here are some of my favourite quotes though.

A God-fearing agnostic, / I tend to look in the corners of things, / Those out-of-the-way places, / The half-dark and half-hidden, / the passed-by and over-looked, / Whenever I want to be sure I can't find something. / I go out of my way to face them and pin them down.
--Confessions of a Song and Dance Man

Some things move in and dig down / whether you want them to or not. / Like pieces of small glass your body subsumes when you are young, / They exit transformed and easy-edged / Many years later, in middle age, when you least expect them, / And shine like Lot's redemption. / College is like this, a vast, exact, / window of stained glass / That shatters without sound as you pass, / Year after year disappearing, unnoticed and breaking off. / Gone, you think, when you are gone, thank God. But look again. / Already the glass is under your skin, / already the journey's on.
--College Days

Our lives, it seems, are a memory / we had once in another place.
--Transparencies

Whatever the root sees in the dark is infinite. / Whatever the dead see is the same.
--Scar Tissue

New skin over old wounds, colorless, numb. / Let the tongue retreat, let the heart be dumb.
--Scar Tissue II