A Short History of the Shadow
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Luminous new poems from the author of "The Appalachian Book of the Dead"
Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.
Don't just do something, sit there.
And so I have, so I have,
the seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound.
-"Body and Soul II"
This is Charles Wright's first collection of verse since the completion of his Appalachian Book of the Dead, the trilogy of trilogies hailed as one "among the great long poems of the century" (James Longenbach, Boston Review). Wright speaks in these poems with characteristic charm, restlessness, and wit, writing again and again, "I sit where I always sit," only to reveal himself in a new setting every time. In A Short History of the Shadow Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
No attentive reader would ever mistake Wright's evocative, sprawling poems for poems by anyone else; many readers, however, find it hard to tell his mature works apart. Wright (who won the Pulitzer for 1997's Black Zodiac) follows up Negative Blue (2000) with a moody, winning collection that plays to his long-recognized strengths: balanced and lengthy musical lines; ambling meditation; beautiful Blue Ridge landscapes; nods to American, Italian and Chinese poets; and a self-aware, pragmatist-cum-Taoist resignation to the fleetingness of all things. "Caught in the weeds and understory of our own lives," Wright says in the opening poem, "proper attention is our refuge now, our perch and our praise." That attention migrates through his evocative collocations of phrase and detail. Two striking suites of short poems with long titles use anaphora and prayer to explore mortality and the night sky: "The late September night is a train of thought, a wound/ That doesn't bleed"; "O Something, be with me, time is short." Another suite, "Relics," swerves from a similar plan into distractingly elaborate allusions to Wallace Stevens. The concluding set of poems, called "Body and Soul," lists "Nightmemories, night outsourcings," deciding that "Ephemera's what moves us." Few readers will see much departure from Wright's work of the 1980s and 1990s; many, however, will be fine with that.
