A Short History of the Shadow: Poems - Softcover

Wright, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374528799 ISBN 13: 9780374528799

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003

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.

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

"In a way, I feel I'm speaking for them" is how Wright described his relationship with "the people on the other side" in an interview in 1981. Twenty-one years and ten collections later, his wry, celebratory dirge drawls on: "Each year it happens this way, each year / Something dead comes back and lifts up its arms, / puts down its luggage / And says … / I bring you good news from the other world." 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.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374528799
• ISBN 13: 9780374528799
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96