Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems - Hardcover

Wright, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374117586 ISBN 13: 9780374117580

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011

Synopsis

Over the course of nineteen collections of poems, Charles Wright has built "one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century" (David Young, Contemporary Poets). Bye-and-Bye, which brings together selections from Wright's more recent work―including the entirety of Littlefoot, Wright's moving, book-length meditation on mortality―showcases the themes and images that have defined his mature work: the true affinity between writer and subject, human and nature; the tenuous relationship between description and actuality; and the search for a truth that transcends change and death.

Bye-and-Bye is a wonderful introduction to the late work of one of America's finest and best-loved poets.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Wright is the United States Poet Laureate. His poetry collections include Country Music, Black Zodiac, Chickamauga, Bye-and-Bye: Selected Later Poems, Sestets, and Caribou. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. Born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee in 1935, he currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Reviews

Wright's poems mix a relentless intensity with the capacity to take inspiration from almost anything—passing thoughts, feelings and memories; other writers; whatever's out the window or nearby in the room. Wright is nothing if not prolific, and this third selected volume gathers poems from his last five books, published since the late 1990s, including the complete text of the book-length poem "Littlefoot," which asserts, "You can't go back,/ you can't repeat the unrepeatable." In Wright's trademark stepped lines, all of these poems—which find a voice not unlike a darker W.S. Merwin—are sobered by assertions like the above, but also by intense notes of ecstasy, which, it turns out, is not always quite pleasant: "Each second the earth is struck hard/ by four and a half pounds of sunlight." Wright is at his most distilled (though also at his most repetitive) in the six-line poems of Sestets, his most recent book, which fix an unearthly glare on thing after thing, yielding, more often than not, cold wisdom: "It is not possible to imagine and feel the pain of others./ We say we do but we don't./ It is a country we have no passport for,/ and no right of entry." (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0374117586
• ISBN 13: 9780374117580
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384