Above the River: The Complete Poems (First Edition)

James Wright (author); Donald Hall (introduction)

ISBN 10: 0374127492 / ISBN 13: 9780374127497

Published by Wesleyan University Press Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York / University Press of New England, 1990

About this Item

First printing. A fine copy in a near-fine jacket. A clean copy with price ($27.99) intact on front flap. Comes with archival-quality jacket protector. Note: Boards are lightly bowed. Jacket spine is lightly faded (as pictured). Light foxing on top edge. Although not marked in any such way, this book came from the library of poet and literary critic J.D. McClatchy, from his estate in Stonington, Connecticut. McClatchy also laid in a draft of a review of the collection (as pictured), which includes McClatchy's handwritten corrections. McClatchy laid in a photocopy of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (which he references in his review draft). The review was published in The New York Times June 17, 1990 issue, with the headline "SITTING HER STRANGELY, ON TOP OF THE SUNLIGHT".

Seller Inventory # McClatchy-489

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Above the River: The Complete Poems (First Edition)
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York / University Press of New England
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374127492
• ISBN 13: 9780374127497
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

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

Reviews

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.