Caribou: Poems - Hardcover

Wright, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374119023 ISBN 13: 9780374119027

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Synopsis

A powerfully moving meditation on life and the beyond, from one of our finest American poets

Charles Wright's truth―the truth of nature, of man's yearning for the divine, of aging―is at the heart of the renowned poet's latest collection, Caribou. This is an elegy to transient beauty, a song for the "stepchild hour, / belonging to neither the light nor dark, / The hour of disappearing things," and an expression of Wright's restless questing for a reality beyond the one before our eyes ("We are all going into a world of dark . . . It's okay. That's where the secrets are, / The big ones, the ones too tall to tell"). Caribou's strength is in its quiet, wry profundity.
"It's good to be here," Wright tells us. "It's good to be where the world's quiescent, and reminiscent." And to be here―in the pages of this stirring collection―is more than good; Caribou is another remarkable gift from the poet around whose influence "the whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, slow circle" (Poetry).

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 has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, nonfiction, and translations, and his awards include a Pulitzer, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Book Award, and the Bollingen and Griffin prizes. The lyrics in his latest collection are short, fluent. The images are elegant, and the manner of address is mellow as he uses “dude,” “man,” and “boy” as intensifiers. The only sequence is titled “Chinoiserie,” though to call it a sequence suggests too strong a relationship between poems linked only by sensibility. This is not a flaw. The book has no flaws, which is to say it fulfills the criteria it sets for itself. The poems instruct us in how to read them. Wright acknowledges his debt to Chinese poetry, and in the images of mountains, sunrise and sunset, the coursing of rivers, the sounds and startling appearance of birds, lengthening shadows, the “Cloud deck assembling its puzzle pieces together / One by one,” change is all, change that ends in changelessness. --Michael Autrey

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374119023
• ISBN 13: 9780374119027
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96