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Rating: 
Summary: the latest from the master
Review: "Every true poem is a spark,/and aspires to the condition of the original fire..." (from "Body and Soul II").In this, Wright's fifteenth volume, the language--urgent and palpable--spills off the page like a shower of sparks. Not since Yeats has a master poet in our language seemed poised to enter such a rich and important later phase. Wright is unquestionably the top dog of our poetry, and in this book his fire shows no sign of dimming. Personally I think that ths book (and fourteen others) are a must-read for anybody interested in what the English language is capable of.
Rating: 
Summary: More Greater Romantic Lyrics
Review: At the beginning of this collection, Charles Wright or his persona looks around his study and wonders "where to begin again?" Well he might ask. In his previous three books Wright compiled one of the most comprehensive long sequences since the Cantos, a massive work he calls the Appalachian Book of the Dead, though it has not yet been published under that title. A Short History of the Shadow, retaining the casually associative open-ended structure of the three preceding collections, concentrates on short poems that may be described as modern pastoral elegy informed by the cross-genre imperative M. H. Abrams has called the "Greater Romantic Lyric," a freely associative first-person meditation rooted in a particularized setting. Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" epitomize the form; and Wright, their successor, is the most persistently Romantic of postmodern poets in his transcendentalism, courtship of the spirit of nature, and assertion of the primacy of imagination in the face of phenomena. He filters Coleridge through his love of ancient Chinese poetry, especially as recreated in the work of James Wright, giving his poetry a luxuriantly multicultural overtone. This new collection seems an extension of the material and methods of the Appalachian poems. It is not clear to me why it shouldn't form part of that sequence, since although its poems stand firmly on their own that's also true of those in Appalachia, Black Zodiac, and Chickamauga.
Rating:
Summary: Wright's Mastery
Review: Chales Wright is an amazingly fine poet. How he is able to look and see things we fastscan everyday and in a mere few phrases turn that blink into quiet monument remains a wonder to all who read him. Read? No, luxuirate. Wright's strange friendship with death introduces us to dark rooms, hand held in his lighted clasp, and gives meaning to all the mysteries nature giggles about in the corner. He is able to pluck the most mundane of ideas and place them in a land of myth and history and encourages us to think? Yes. But also he encourages just to read his poems again and again..........along with the poems of others, he adds, smilingly. Continuingly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Full of wonder shared with human frailty
Review: Chales Wright is an amazingly fine poet. How he is able to look and see things we fastscan everyday and in a mere few phrases turn that blink into quiet monument remains a wonder to all who read him. Read? No, luxuirate. Wright's strange friendship with death introduces us to dark rooms, hand held in his lighted clasp, and gives meaning to all the mysteries nature giggles about in the corner. He is able to pluck the most mundane of ideas and place them in a land of myth and history and encourages us to think? Yes. But also he encourages just to read his poems again and again..........along with the poems of others, he adds, smilingly. Continuingly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Charles the Comforter
Review: Charles Wright's latest volume is a true heir to his previous work and a very fulfilling continuation of his main themes. No other contemporary poet, or perhaps any poet ever, has so insightfully unpacked the single mystery of our humanness like Wright. His basic metaphor remains intact: the mystery, and indeed the concept of God, in relation to man is examined through the vehicle of nature - from the tiny and seemingly insignificant, to the vast cosmos. All the while, that which is visible and that which is not, will nod in and out for their brilliant cameos - one moment it is language itself, the next, a dogwood bloom. His imagery remains unique, beautiful, and so inventive that ripping it out of context would only serve to confuse.
Readers of Wright will be pleased that his melancholia of previous work has not been replaced so much as supplanted by a new sense of humor ("If This Is Where God's At, Why Is That Fish Dead?" and "If My Glasses Were Better, I Could See Where I'm Headed For" open the second section). Fellow poets will no doubt continue to marvel at his style. It has been said that viewing an Ansel Adams makes one never want to pick up a camera, and viewing a Walker Evans causes a desire to pick one up, yet reading Wright makes one realize there is no need for the amateur to attempt poetry.
Wright's previous works have been called a "trilogy of Dantean scope" and one is reminded not only of Dante, but Joyce when examining this latest work. If Joyce's "trilogy" of Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegan" were meant to be summed up in a coherent statement of the universes itself in a fourth work, prevented by his untimely death, as the legend goes, then that statement would likely resemble in spirit "A Short History of the Shadow."
Wright once again reminds us that all of us struggle with, as he has stated "the indifferent silence of heaven," and he so tactfully and playfully resonates with our reflections on our mortality that he is more than a great poet, he is a great comforter.
Rating:
Summary: Charles the composer
Review: The poems in this book are so, so unique. Nobody else writes like Charles Wright. & one beautiful asoect about his writing is of course the SOUND. It's clear that the music of language is of prime importance to Charles Wright as a poet. Just listen to these few lines: "Soul-shunt and pat down, crumbs snow flecked across the back yard, then gone on the sun's tongue." My. The whole book sounds that refined. Also, the whole lexus beyond only the sounds is impeccable. For example, in Nine Panel Yaak River Screen, a poem of high ellipticism, there's a line where "sunlight opens her other leg." It's poetry that resonates with very deeply rooted decisions & organisation. Another poem ends "The broken dream-cries of angel half-dazed in the woods. The adjective and the noun." Wonderful.
Rating:
Summary: Charles the composer
Review: The poems in this book are so, so unique. Nobody else writes like Charles Wright. One beautiful aspect about his writing is of course the SOUND. It's clear that the music of language is of prime importance to Charles Wright as a poet. Just listen to these few lines: "Soul-shunt and pat down, crumbs snow flecked across the back yard, then gone on the sun's tongue." My. The whole book sounds that refined. Also, the whole lexus beyond only the sounds is impeccable. For example, in Nine Panel Yaak River Screen, a poem of high ellipticism, there's a line where "sunlight opens her other leg." It's poetry that resonates with very deeply rooted decisions & organisation. Another poem ends "The broken dream-cries of angel half-dazed in the woods. The adjective and the noun." Wonderful.
Rating:
Summary: compelling
Review: The sounds of this poetry are amazing. The music is unbound & sprawling. Wholly modern. Of all the Pulitzer Prize winners, Charles Wright is one of my favorites. This poetry is very idiosyncratic.
Rating:
Summary: compelling
Review: The sounds of this poetry are amazing. The music is unbound & sprawling. Wholly modern. Of all the Pulitzer Prize winners, Charles Wright is one of my favorites. This poetry is very idiosyncratic.
Rating:
Summary: Wright's Mastery
Review: This book isn't Wright's best, and pales a little after the volumes collected in Negative Blue. That it's still very, very good--perhaps the best book from any of the older generation SINCE Negative Blue--is a testament to Wright's power. I reccomend this book highly, but don't fail to read the rest of his books.
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