Sestets: Poems

"Charles Wright has been America's reigning southern mystic for almost four decades now. In books like Country Music and Chickamauga, he turned the mythology of his native Tennessee and Virginia into a mirror cosmology of the heaven. History, he poems observe, is as immutable as distant galaxies. Bent-back, sober-eyes, his poems reach wisdom with wonder and curiosity, traveling along a poetic line that is so uniquely his own it comes with its own sound. With Sestets, however, Wright has begun to address the most immutable thing of all—mortality. Not surprisingly, this is a dark and intimate book, to read these poems is to eavesdrop on a man meditating on life's final question . . . Time and again, the poems in Sestets perform this surprising pivot: pondering eternity, they cascade from a position of terror to a grace note . . . The form helps him along. A sestet is the second half of an Italian sonnet, the part where emotion takes a turn . . . There are more than five-dozen poems in Sestets, a feast by many standards. But the poems have a delicacy which cannot be gorged upon. Reading this book straight through cheapens its tentative wisdom. It also reveals the rare few moments when Wright reaches for meaning rather than allows it occur through the evolution of a poem . . . Like Gary Snyder, Wright is at his best when he has become all but invisible within his own work. Even in poems that ponder the vanity of descriptive arts—I see it, therefore it exists—he displays an astonishing descriptive facility."—John Freeman, Sun Sentinel

"This 19th collection by the much-garlanded Wright finds the poet in his familiar meditative stance, but here he imposes calibrated limits on both his universe of available influences and his stylistic range in order to ferret out 'the metaphysics of the quotidian.' Keeping metaphor and simile to a minimum, Wright draws his concrete imagery from the immediate, Walden-like surroundings of a country landscape ('one duck on the narrow water, pond/Stocked with clouds') with the patience and diligence of a bird-watcher, probing for signs and wonders they might suggest. What he conveys in these seemingly casual, spare, six-line poems is a sense of bittersweet impermanence, an ephemerality that underlies everything ('Like shadows, we spread ourselves until our hands touch, then disappear in the dark')."—Fred Muratori, Library Journal

"Wright's gifts for single long lines, simple description and lyrical sound effects are second to none; he is the recipient of almost every American poetry award, including the Pulitzer. Even so gifted a poet, though, risks repeating himself after 18 books; the longer poems had begun to look like collections of interchangeable lines, however beautiful. If Wright was in a rut, this 19th book has found a neat way out. The 69 poems here, not unlike most of his earlier work, show vistas from the Upper South and points of view derived from Taoism, but they share a self-limiting form that is fresh for Wright: each has only six lines . . . In these sestets great yearnings and brief descriptions collide, cancel or reinforce each other: 'The heart of the world lies open, leached and ticking with sunlight/ For just a minute or so,' says one poem. In another, 'The past is so dark, you need a flashlight to find your own shoes.' Mortality is omnipresent, but so is beauty, in and around Charlottesville (where Wright teaches), in our musical heritage, in the night sky. Wright's compression tries to see that every subject, every image, receives its due."—Publishers Weekly