Above the River: The Complete Poems

Poems deal with love, travel, myth, friendship, the past, the seasons, mortality, and language

Wright (1927-1980) has enjoyed a widespread influence on American poets; this collection of his life's work eloquently shows why. Born to a working-class family in Ohio, Wright was educated at Kenyon College, and though he traveled to Europe and lived in New York City, in his poetry he returned in an often elegiac mode to his industrially marred but still suggestive native Midwestern landscape. Writing with a "lonely wisdom" of life's fragility, Wright has few peers; his regrets over the limits of mortality, love and language are tempered, with utmost tenderness, by a sympathetic willingness to experience and endure. In purity of image, rhythm and solitariness of tone, Wright reflects the work of his admired Theodore Roethke and Edgar Arlington Robinson, as well as that of Robert Frost, but the aura of delicately wistful dreaming evoked in matchless free verse is his alone. In this collection, readers can handily compare Wright's early formal poems with his later, more fluid style; sandwiched in are his translations of work by Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda and others.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Wright is one of the most influential poets of our time, and this volume reflects 40 years' work. As a young man, and a Yale Younger poet (1957), he embraced traditional forms even while addressing nontraditional subject matter: "When I went out to kill myself, I caught/ A pack of hoodlums beating up a man." The true power of Wright's poetry is most obvious in his free verse, where simple images and "the pure clean word" were all he needed to capture the almost unbearable tension between deathward suffering and the desire to endure, to love, and to accept the world's pleasures: "Suddenly I realize/That if I stepped out of my body I would break/ Into blossom." Wright's later poems are his best, a blend of pictures and sound, but whether he is writing tight iambs about his hometown in Ohio, free and daring lines about cold Minnesota, or even prose poems celebrating his Italian summers, his is "The poetry of a grown man." Essential for all serious collections.
- Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.