Sestets is the nineteenth book from one of the country's most acclaimed poets, a masterpiece of formal rigor and a profound meditation on nature and mortality. It is yet another virtuosic showcase for Charles Wright's acclaimed descriptive powers, and also an inquiry into the nature of description itself, both seductive and dangerous: "a virtual world/ Unfit for the virtuous." Like his previous books, Sestets is seeded with the lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, and...

Charles Wright called his seventh collection Zone Journals to emphasize how the poems draw on time and place as their starting point. But despite the air of immediacy and informality, they are artfully composed, informed as always by Wright's profound sense of subliminal order."Called one of our best middle-generation poets, Wright offers as his seventh collection a series of meditations emphasizing time and place. He draws upon history (especially Renaissance Italy), his o...

The World of Ten Thousand Things gathers The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), Zone Journals (1988), and a new group of poems, "Xionia," into one volume, allowing us to see Wright's work of the past decade as, in essence, one long poem, a meditation on self, history, and the metaphysical that is among the most ambitious and resonant creations in contemporary American poetry.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle AwardBlack Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal vers...

After the end of something, there comes another end,This one behind you, and far away.Only a lifetime can get you to it,and then just barely.Littlefoot, the eighteenth book from one of this country's most acclaimed poets, is an extended meditation on mortality, on the narrator's search of the skies for a road map and for last instructions on "the other side of my own death." Following the course of one year, the poet's seventieth, we witness the seasons...

A compilation of powerful and moving poems from early in the poet's career.Co-winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry, Country Music is comprised of eighty-eight poems selected from Charles Wright's first four books published between 1970 and 1977. From his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand passions: his desire to reclaim a...

Negative Blue is the culmination of the cycle that won Wright the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award.Time will append us like suit coats left out overnightOn a deck chair, loose change dead weight in the right pocket,Silk handkerchief limp with dew,sleeves in a slow dance with the wind.And love will kill us--Love, and the winds from under the earththat grin...

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

Almost thirty years ago, Charles Wright (who teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry) began a poetic project of astonishing scope--a series of three trilogies. The first trilogy was collected in Country Music, the second in The World of the Ten Thousand Things, and the third began with Chickamauga and continued with Black Zodiac. Appalachia is the last bo...

The selected works of one of our finest American poetsThe thread that dangles usbetween a dark and a darker dark,Is luminous, sure, but smooth sided.Don't touch it here, and don't touch it there.Don't touch it, in fact, anywhere—Let it dangle and hold us hard, let it flash and swing.—from "Scar Tissue"Over the course of his work—more than twenty books in total—Char...

The acclaimed collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet whose work is "conceived in a manner that never ceased to astonish" (Helen Vendler, The New Republic).Over the course of nineteen collections of poems, former US Poet Laureate Charles Wright has built "one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century" (David Young, Contemporary Poets).Bye-and-Bye, which brings together select...

This volume, Wright's eleventh book of poetry, is a vivid, contemplative, far-reaching, yet wholly plain-spoken collection of moments appearing as lenses through which to see the world beyond our moments. Chickamauga is also a virtuoso exploration of the power of concision in lyric poetry--a testament to the flexible music of the long line Wright has made his own. As a reviewer in Library Journal noted: "Wright is one of those rare and gifted poets who can turn thought in...