Reign of Snakes (Penguin Poets) - Softcover

Wrigley, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140589198 ISBN 13: 9780140589191

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1999

Synopsis

Described by the late James Dickey as "one of the finest new poets to come along in years," Robert Wrigley fulfills that early promise with this, his newest collection. Reign of Snakes is a book about desire, the soul's desire as much as the body's. As Jane Hirshfield said of Wrigley's previous book, In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995), "To read it is to unpeel a little further into the human, and into the wideness that holds the human--a splendid gift." Reign of Snakes takes us to yet another level, deep into the daily devotions, "where the dark blows a kiss to night."

. . . a frigid day in February and a full-grownrattlesnake curled to a comma in the middle of the middle of the just-plowed road. Ice ghost, I think, curve of rock or stubbed-off branch. But the diamonds are there, under a dust of crystals looming, impossible, summer's tattoo, the mythical argyle of evil.

--from "Reign of Snakes"

About this title

About the Author

Robert Wrigley is a recipient of numerous grants and fellowships. His sixth and most recent book, Lives of the Animals, won the 2004 Poets’ Prize.

From Kirkus Reviews

His first two books recently reprinted by the Univ. of Illinois Press, the Idaho-based Wrigley, in his fifth, again proves why he earned the imprimatur of the late James Dickey. Wrigleys harsh and raw verse exults in its masculinity, and in the toughness of nature: his wife, in one poem, smells the testosterone in the images of heavy equipment floating downriver after a flood. But this and other bouts of sappinessespecially in poems about his childrenshouldnt distract from Wrigleys strength in poems that re-create in their sounds natures gutturals: his compound word-hoards rely on all the non-metrical devices (assonance, consonance, alliteration, internal rhymes) to capture the brutality on display all around him in the West. Many of these poems locate him in the wilderness, as vigilist, eulogist, and even savior. Both Whitman and the Bible lurk behind his long lines, and a number of his longer narratives are printed in italics, alerting us to the heightened language: in The Afterlife, he aspires to the stillness of the heron; in Amazing Grace, his admitted yawp sounds good, but meanders like Dickey at his incoherent worst; in Meditation at Bedrock Canyon, another self-conscious nod to Whitman, he celebrates the forest medieval; and the last one, The Name, witnesses the birth of his son, exhibiting the poets sensitivity. The most memorable sequence, though, is the title section, nine narratives with snakes in them, from a portrait of a religious snakehandler to the memory of a beautiful woman next door in his youth, who snapped a copperhead dead with one whip. The creepiest section puns on the title of the volumea literal rain of snakes drops down on an earthmover that hits upon a den. Ophidiphobes beware: others will tire of Wrigleys pantheistic excess, and his expansive need to embrace even bathos. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0140589198
• ISBN 13: 9780140589191
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112