Synopses & Reviews
Luminous new poems from one who “has long been a poet of gorgeous description” William Logan, The New CriterionLandscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.
Dont 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 Wrights 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, Wrights return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.
Charles Wright was awarded the National Book Award in Poetry in 1983 for Country Music and the 1995 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Chickamauga. In 2008, he was honored for his lifetime achievement with the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. This is Wright's first collection of verse since the gathering, in Negative Blue, of the three books he called his Appalachian Book of the Deadan extended work "sure to be counted among the great long poems of the century" (James Longenbach, Boston Review).
In these new poems, Wright speaks and muses in the modes of pastoral, elegy, and homagemethods of poetic address he has made his ownwith characteristic restlessness, wit, perception, and meditative insight. In A Short History of the Shadow, in a world haunted by death and the dead, Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art, as ever, resilient, haunting, and singular.
"The premier poet in America . . . No one makes the music Charles Wright makes."Virginia Quarterly Review
"The premier poet in America . . . No one makes the music Charles Wright makes."Virginia Quarterly Review
"Wright, Tennessean by birth and Italian by sensibility (he taught himself to write by translating Montale in the sixties), invokes Dante with an Appalachian tongue."The New Yorker
"[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
"There are precious few poets in whose work I find as much sheer wisdom as in Wright's . . . The whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, slow circle around Wright's grave influence."David Baker, Poetry
"Wright, who wrote his first poem as an Army intelligence officer in Italy in 1959 after reading Erza Pound, studied at the Iowa Writer's Workshop when poetry was moving from formal verse to free verse. Carefully constructed pieces of architecture made to look breezy and effortless, his poems reflect those opposing forces. Reading his work [transports] you to another world."Amy Sparks, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
"[Readers] will find their efforts well rewarded by the vividness and inventiveness of this poet's descriptive writing, by the evocative music of his language, and by the centrality of the issues he raises as he explores the human condition . . . These poems will assuredly spark keen insights in their readers and will deepen appreciation for the continuing excellence of Wright's artistic achievement."John Lang, Appalachian Heritage
"No attentive reader would ever mistake Wright's evocative, sprawling poems for poems by anyone else . . . [A Short History of the Shadow is] 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."Publishers Weekly
"Over the course of 15 books of poetry and numerous prestigious awards (including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for 1998's Black Zodiac), Charles Wright has never left his back yard. His new volume is no exception . . . And if Wright retains his backyard lawnchair throne here, he also preserves other aspects of his recent writing, from his unassuageable obsession with landscape to his deadly accurate use of figurative language . . . to the classic and meditative musical line he has made his own. A Short History of the Shadow is populated with the presence of ghostly and shadowy mastersMandelstam, Catullus, Cézanne, García Lorca, Wang Weiand again he enlists himself as their disciple, saying in 'Looking Around III' that 'We were born to escort the dead, and be escorted ourselves' . . . [These are] gorgeous, tired, lonely lines, full of grace and heartrending redundancy, cast as a shadow on a few pages of bound paper."Oni Buchanan, The Boston Phoenix
"The unusual aspect of all his poems, long and short, is that they are interconnected and an integral part of a larger body of work, which includes almost everything he has written. In other words, Wright's ambition includes both the individual lyric and a long [on-going] poem. I'd like to marry Emily and Walt, he has said on a couple of occasions, and he has certainly tried to do so . . . For Wright, the trees in his backyard, light and shadow, stars, mountains, the sun and the moon . . . have [all] served the same function. He pays close attention to them, letting their daily variations in appearance jump-start a poem. One would expect this obsessive single-mindedness to weary the reader after a while, but strangely that is not the case. All things that are the same are also different, Wright proves over and over again. When it comes to describing nature, he is endlessly inventive . . . More than any of his contemporaries I can think of, Wright is capable of saying things memorably. He can write lyrics of great beauty that achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don't know what is."Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books
"Over a long career [Wright] has perfected a particular kind of meditative lyric and an instantly identifiable style. In a sense, that style is the poem, its recurrent drama or story, which is always about what it enacts: the poet's search for words adequate to the world unfolding before him, day by day . . . Wright loves the world but he is impatient to get beyond it. And we feel both impulses in his lavish, restless style . . . Wright is at heart a mystic, not an aesthete. He isn't satisfied with a pretty picture. He knows there is a landscape behind this one . . . Yet our only access to that 'it'to the being beyond appearances, what Wright calls Eden, the source of all thingscomes in how we see it, day by day, poem after poem, year after year. Because our access is incomplete and metaphorical, dependent on words and their inconstant power, it always needs to be renewed. Wright insists that this renewal of vision justifies the moral and aesthetic risks it entails (risks of repetition, complacence, and fatigue). The poems in A Short History of the Shadow prove again that it does."Langdon Hammer, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"This [book offers] a creative gleaning of everyday events presented in a style that makes each poem a classic. Wright instinctively knows where to intersperse with personal impressions, yet nothing is ever excessive. His word-timing is impeccable . . . There is a deep quality to each poem, always something vaguely familiar in the ingenious selection of descriptions that meld perfectly together and raise his poetry high above the norm . . . In each poem, the cadence of his words rhythmically rises and falls, leaving readers breathless at times but always marveling at his control of presentation."Lorraine Lauzon, The Catholic Observer
"Wright [here] continues his fascinating tinkering with one of the grand traditions of English-language poetry. Wright's chosen genre is the Nature lyric. But he might well be pleased if some earnest readers hesitate to call his pieces lyrics, or even poems, at all. Wright's pursuit of the visionary in the ordinary is relentless, yet skeptical . . . what is a 'Nature poet,' anyway? In A Short History of the Shadow Wright might be better described as a comic dramatist of sensory psychology. His speakers (who characteristically encourage us to view them as the poet Charles Wright) sit and lookand watch themselves looking. Wright gently mocks his sedentary muse and introspective tendencies when, on the last page of the book, he says to himself 'Don't just do something, sit there' . . . But passive as he can seem, Wright is certainly not ignorant of what's sometimes called the world of action . . . The continual shock of transience ripples through all his work; therefore, the action in his poems is the action of the perceiving imagination, the action of the apprehended senses."Ron Smith, Richmond Times-Dispatch
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
Luminous new poems from one who “has long been a poet of gorgeous description” —William Logan, The New CriterionLandscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.
Dont 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 Wrights 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, Wrights return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.
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.
Charles Wright was awarded the National Book Award in Poetry in 1983 for Country Music and the 1995 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Chickamauga. In 2008, he was honored for his lifetime achievement with the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. This is Wright's first collection of verse since the gathering, in Negative Blue, of the three books he called his Appalachian Book of the Dead--an extended work sure to be counted among the great long poems of the century (James Longenbach, Boston Review).
In these new poems, Wright speaks and muses in the modes of pastoral, elegy, and homage--methods of poetic address he has made his own--with characteristic restlessness, wit, perception, and meditative insight. In A Short History of the Shadow, in a world haunted by death and the dead, Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art, as ever, resilient, haunting, and singular.
The premier poet in America . . . No one makes the music Charles Wright makes.--Virginia Quarterly Review
The premier poet in America . . . No one makes the music Charles Wright makes.--Virginia Quarterly Review
Wright, Tennessean by birth and Italian by sensibility (he taught himself to write by translating Montale in the sixties), invokes Dante with an Appalachian tongue.--The New Yorker
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
There are precious few poets in whose work I find as much sheer wisdom as in Wright's . . . The whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, slow circle around Wright's grave influence.--David Baker, Poetry
Wright, who wrote his first poem as an Army intelligence officer in Italy in 1959 after reading Erza Pound, studied at the Iowa Writer's Workshop when poetry was moving from formal verse to free verse. Carefully constructed pieces of architecture made to look breezy and effortless, his poems reflect those opposing forces. Reading his work transports] you to another world.--Amy Sparks, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Readers] will find their efforts well rewarded by the vividness and inventiveness of this poet's descriptive writing, by the evocative music of his language, and by the centrality of the issues he raises as he explores the human condition . . . These poems will assuredly spark keen insights in their readers and will deepen appreciation for the continuing excellence of Wright's artistic achievement.--John Lang, Appalachian Heritage
No attentive reader would ever mistake Wright's evocative, sprawling poems for poems by anyone else . . . A Short History of the Shadow is] 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.--Publishers Weekly
Over the course of 15 books of poetry and numerous prestigious awards (including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for 1998's Black Zodiac), Charles Wright has never left his back yard. His new volume is no exception . . . And if Wright retains his backyard lawnchair throne here, he also preserves other aspects of his recent writing, from his unassuageable obsession with landscape to his deadly accurate use of figurative language . . . to the classic and meditative musical line he has made his own. A Short History of the Shadow is populated with the presence of ghostly and shadowy masters--Mandelstam, Catullus, Cezanne, Garcia Lorca, Wang Wei--and again he enlists himself as their disciple, saying in 'Looking Around III' that 'We were born to escort the dead, and be escorted ourselves' . . . These are] gorgeous, tired, lonely lines, full of grace and heartrending redundancy, cast as a shadow on a few pages of bound paper.--Oni Buchanan, The Boston Phoenix
The unusual aspect of all his poems, long and short, is that they are interconnected and an integral part of a larger body of work, which includes almost everything he has written. In other words, Wright's ambition includes both the individual lyric and a long on-going] poem. I'd like to marry Emily and Walt, he has said on a couple of occasions, and he has certainly tried to do so . . . For Wright, the trees in his backyard, light and shadow, stars, mountains, the sun and the moon . . . have all] served the same function. He pays close attention to them, letting their daily variations in appearance jump-start a poem. One would expect this obsessive single-mindedness to weary the reader after a while, but strangely that is not the case. All things that are the same are also different, Wright proves over and over again. When it comes to describing nature, he is endlessly inventive . . . More than any of his contemporaries I can think of, Wright is capable of saying things memorably. He can write lyrics of great beauty that achieve a l
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.