Synopses & Reviews
The sun has set behind the Blue Ridge, And evening with its blotting paper
lifts off the light.
Shadowy yards. Moon through the white pines
--"Landscape with Missing Overtones"
Never has Charles Wright's vision been more closely aligned with the work of the ancient Chinese painters and writers who inform his poetry than in his newest collection. Wright's short lyrics, in Charles Simic's words, "achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don't know what is" (The New York Review of Books). The poems in Buffalo Yoga are pristine examples of the Tennessee poet's deft, painterly touch--"crows in a caterwaul" are "scored like black notes in the bare oak"--and his oblique, expansive, and profound interrogation of mortality, as in the title sequence, where the soul is "a rhythmical knot. / That form unties. Or reties."
The poetry of Charles Wright has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and other honors. Wright teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Never has Charles Wright's vision been more closely aligned with the work of those ancient Chinese painters and writers who inform his poetry than in Buffalo Yoga, his newest collection of verse.
Wright's short lyrics, in Charles Simic's words, "achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don't know what is" (The New York Review of Books). The poems in Buffalo Yoga are pristine examples of the Tennessee poet's deft, painterly touch"crows in a caterwaul" are, for example, "scored like black notes in the bare oak." Throughout these pages we find Wright employing such masterful imagery to make an oblique, expansive, and profound interrogation of mortalityespecially in the title sequence, where the soul is "a rhythmical knot. / That form unties. Or reties." The latest collection from "the premier poet in America" (Virginia Quarterly Review). "[Wright] finds the sublime in the unlikeliest places, and at his best makes you think such places are exactly where to look."William Logan, The New Criterion
"[Wright's] penetrating and ravishingly gorgeous lyrical poems are at once classically philosophical and freshly revealing. For Wright, the brimming natural world is holy, yet he anthropomorphizes nature with rampant inventiveness, intimacy, wit, and wonder . . . Buffalo Yoga, the title of this elegantly contemplative collection and of the long, enrapturing poem at its heart, evocatively names the union between nature and human consciousness . . . Wright, a profoundly yogic poet, illuminates and exalts in the entire astonishing spectrum of existence."Donna Seaman, Booklist
Review
"[Wright] finds the sublime in the unlikeliest places, and at his best makes you think such places are exactly where to look."
--William Logan, The New Criterion
Synopsis
The sun has set behind the Blue Ridge, And evening with its blotting paper
lifts off the light.
Shadowy yards. Moon through the white pines
--"Landscape with Missing Overtones"
Never has Charles Wright's vision been more closely aligned with the work of the ancient Chinese painters and writers who inform his poetry than in his newest collection. Wright's short lyrics, in Charles Simic's words, "achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don't know what is" (The New York Review of Books). The poems in Buffalo Yoga are pristine examples of the Tennessee poet's deft, painterly touch--"crows in a caterwaul" are "scored like black notes in the bare oak"--and his oblique, expansive, and profound interrogation of mortality, as in the title sequence, where the soul is "a rhythmical knot. / That form unties. Or reties."
Synopsis
Luminous new poems from one who 'has long been a poet of gorgeous description' -William Logan, "The New Criterion
"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.
-from "Body and Soul II"
This is Charles Wright's first collection of verse since the gathering, in "Negative Blue, of his "Appalachian Book of the Dead" a trilogy of trilogies hailed among the great long poems of the century-- (James Longenbach, "Boston Review). 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.
Synopsis
The sun has set behind the Blue Ridge, And evening with its blotting paper
lifts off the light.
Shadowy yards. Moon through the white pines
--"Landscape with Missing Overtones"
Never has Charles Wright's vision been more closely aligned with the work of the ancient Chinese painters and writers who inform his poetry than in his newest collection. Wright's short lyrics, in Charles Simic's words, "achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don't know what is" (The New York Review of Books). The poems in Buffalo Yoga are pristine examples of the Tennessee poet's deft, painterly touch--"crows in a caterwaul" are "scored like black notes in the bare oak"--and his oblique, expansive, and profound interrogation of mortality, as in the title sequence, where the soul is "a rhythmical knot. / That form unties. Or reties."
About the Author
Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.