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This important book--shot through with reflections on, explorations of, and hymns to both our natural and spiritual realms--features the three poetry collections Charles Wright published during the 1980s: The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), and Zone Journals (1988).
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Appropriate introduction to the works of a master
This collection begins with "Homage to Paul Cezanne," one of Wright's most accessible poems and the first poem I would pick to teach students about metaphor. It begins:

The dead are a cadmium blue.
We spread them with palette knives in broad blocks and planes.

We layer them stroke by stroke
In steps and ascending mass, in verticals raised from the earth.

We choose, and layer them in,
Blue and a blue and a breath,

Circle and smudge, cross-beak and buttonhook,
We layer them in. We squint hard and terrace them line by line.


You can see in this passage the seeds of the lulling rhythm, like walking meditation, that has become Wright's signature: "Blue and a blue and a breath." In the fifteen years since this book was issued, Wright has refined his technique to become master of the minimalist nature lyric; this relatively early collection showcases the transition from poet to genius as the author gropes for and finds his music.

Wright's work is among the best literature to come out of the South this century, and he is only improving with time. I can only assume that the entire Appalachian Book of the Dead series will be reprinted in one gigantic tome sometime in the next decade or two. In the meantime, if you can't afford to buy each of his books now, springing for this one is a great place to start.

Truly beautiful
This collection of poems is truly beautiful. Some of the material in here is accessible to anyone while some of it is more essoteric. Being a collection, it covers a wide range of work, some of which I like more than others. When Wright succeeds, though, he does so more brilliantly than any other contemporary poet I know of. ... Read more

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"[Wright's] penetrating and ravishingly gorgeous lyrical poems are at once classically philosophical and freshly revealing" (Booklist)

Never has Charles Wright's vision been more closely aligned with the work of the ancient Chinese painters and writers who inform his poetry than in his newest collection. Wright's short lyrics, in Charles Simic's words, "achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don't know what is" (The New York Review of Books). The poems in Buffalo Yoga are pristine examples of the Tennessee poet's deft, painterly touch-"crows in a caterwaul" are "scored like black notes in the bare oak"-and his oblique, expansive, and profound interrogation of mortality, as in the title sequence, where the soul is "a rhythmical knot. / That form unties. Or reties."
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On the road to find out
If you're going to read Charles Wright, start with his translations of Montale.Then dive into the books in the order in which they were written, and you'll have a good journey through one of the freshest voices in contempory poetry. ... Read more

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Explorations in the underlap...
Poetry, they say, can be partly defined as an utterance incapable of being paraphrased.That is true of all Charles Wright's work, insofar as I'm familiar with it, but especially so of Scar Tissue.

This is a work that exists in the inbetween.It is full of things felt, not known; things intuited, not reasoned; of "the endless sky with its endless cargo of cloud parts" (Scar Tissue); and of whole days where "the wind will comb out it's hair through the teeth of the evergreens." and "the sunlight will sun itself/ On the back porch of the cottage, out of the weather." (Scar Tissue II)

It is beautiful, quietly and very familiarly ruminative: just you and an old friend sipping some single batch bourbon (Wright is, after all, fromdown that way) talking with an easy speculative walking pace kind of riff about memories, places you've been, things you've seen, the geography you belong to.I can not begin to tell you how much I love these poems.Appearances by: Li Po, Hildegard of Bingen, Basho, Heraclitus and the Appalachia Dog....a metallic red '49 Ford, chopped and channeled, a "major ride" seen once "dragging the gut" in Kingsport and remembered ever after with it's "taillights like nobody's eyes/ Low-riding west toward the rising sun." (Appalachia Dog)

To my view, there are no duds or weak spots.There's lots to think about and lots to just plain enjoy and, frankly, it doesn't make your head hurt. But it is the expression of the felt intangible that distinguishes these poems for me or as Wright himself puts it: "The absence the two/ horses have left on the bare slope,/ The silence that grazes like two shapes where they have been."and then "Flecked in the underlap, however,/ half-glimpsed, half-recognized,/ Something unordinary persists,/ Something unstill, never-sleeping, just possible past reason./ Then unflecked by evening's overflow/ and its counter current." (Against the American Grain)

In this day and age, for poems this highly decorated from a poet with Wright's critical renown to be this readable and widely accessable is a minor miracle.Great great work. Pick it up; join this extraordinary fellow, Mr. Charles Wright, in his explorations in the underlap.....
Highly recommended.

Welcome to my backyard. Would you like some zen with that?
Charles Wright is probably one of the best poets around today.His images are strong, his language direct, his allusions trackable.He's also one of the few poets I've read over a period of 15 years or more, so it's with great anticipation that I look forward to his new work.Some of these poems appeared in a chapbook THE WRONG SIDE OF THE RAINBOW, so I felt lucky to have had a headstart on SCAR TISSUE.It's a good read, a good reread, and good for study. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

topsy turvy
The cover of this book reproduces a masterpiece of Chinese calligraphy -- upside down. I once wrote to the publisher asking why they didn't turn it right-side up, but they never responded. I wonder if they did that intentionally, or through ignorance. That would be like printing a page from the Book of Kells upside down.

& wholly modern
This book is a beautifully eloquent, quiet meditation on so many mysteries & philosophies, influenced by both western & eastern canons.

Why Black Zodiac?
Considering the many excellent poetry books that were published in 1997, why did Charles Wright's Black Zodiac, which is not very good, win the most prestigious poetry award, the Pulitzer Prize?It probably has something to do with POLITICS viz. Jorie Graham told Helen Vendler to select Black Zodiac and soon after Wright -- naturally, Mark Strand.

Although I don't think that Black Zodiac deserves the Pulitzer, I do think that Mr. Wright should have won the Pulitzer for China Trace, The Southern Cross and The Other Side of the River.The Other Side of the River and selections from Zone Journals were Mr. Wright's best books.After Zone Journals, Mr. Wright began to depend on skill, technique and repetition as a means of `crafting' his poems.In his earlier work, it seems as though his poems were spontaneously inspired and that they came together in entire stanzas or full sequences in which very little revision was applied, save for touch-up considerations.In the Paris Review Interview, Mr. Wright explained that he now counts every syllable and that he works on one line at a time.Unfortunately, it shows.

Here is an example of Mr. Wright's earlier work.These lines are taken from The Other Side of the River:

...

What is it about a known landscape/that tends to undo us,/That shuffles and picks us out/For terminal demarcation, the way a field of lupine/Seen in profusion deep in the timber/Suddenly seems to rise like a lavender ground fog/At noon?/What is it inside the imagination that keeps surprising us/At odd moments when something is given back/We didn't know we had had/In solitude, spontaneously, and with great joy?

`Lonesome Pine Special'

And now consider these lines from Black Zodiac: ...

For instance, in 1944...I was nine, the fourth grade.../I remember telling Brooklyn, my best friend, my **** was stiff all night./Nine years old!My ****!All night!/We talked about it for days,/Oak Ridge abstracted and elsewhere,/,D-Day and Normandy come and gone,/All eyes on the new world's sun king,/Its rising up and its going down.

`Apologia Pro Vita Sua'

Those lines are not only bad,they're embarrassing! Apparently, Mr. Wright is incapable of distinguishing good from bad poetry.If he is,then his editor at FSG should have enough sense to tell this author when sections of the poem do not work.

If you wish to read Mr. Wright's best poetry,poetry that really sets the page on fire, read his earlier work from China Trace up to Zone Journals.

voice, and time
each time i read it i find a different favorite poem, formidible ways of addressing understood mystries

The "seasons" of Charles Wright
These are the themes that I see in Wright's work: seasons, a journey, memory, "God", landscape, the power of language, the power of silence, the politics of place and time and particularly, theprocess/effects of grief, in many senses. "Black Zodiac"continues Wright's relationship to the play among time, place, and seasons.In this book of poems, I think there is an increasing sense of theinterplay of memory and "aging." Wright's poems offer a look intosolitary, yet common, moments when we speak the "truth" toourselves....for example he asks, "What are the determining moments ofour lives?/How do we know them?/ Are they ends of things orbeginnings?" Another key, and pressing, theme to this book is Wright'sstruggle over agency-- do you give yourself over to "nature", tothe "landscape", or try to negotiate the always-human tendency tocontrol life's outcomes? Is this even a choice? He says, "To someonestarting out on a long journey...take it easy..../Relax, let's what'staking take you..." This is an important and powerful collection ofpoetry...from a brilliant poet with a deep, and critical, understanding oflanguage. ... Read more

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After Image-Picking
One way to read "Littlefoot" is as an imagist's attempt to write a long poem. (Wright aptly calls himself an "image-picker" somewhere in this book.) It is a single poem rather than a sequence; in fact, the "plot" connecting nearby poems -- the progression of seasons -- is often clearer than the loose thematic connections between the segments of an individual poem. As Wright explained in "Apologia pro Vita Sua," his basic form is the journal. The "journal" -- of Wright's 70th year -- tracks his thoughts and surroundings from one October to the next. Wright has always been admired for his ability to write so interestingly about so little; in "Littlefoot," the subject matter has dwindled to essentially nothing, and the writing is as good as ever. All the poems are in Wright's usual two-step free verse line (lines that begin in lowercase are indented):

The great mouth of the west hangs open,
mountain incisors beginning to bite
Into the pink flesh of the sundown. (14)

When the rains blow, and the hurricane flies,
nobody has the right box
To fit the arisen in.
Out of the sopped earth, out of dank bones,
They seep in their watery strings
wherever the water goes.
Who knows when their wings will dry out, who knows their next knot? (1)

The stars drift like cold fires through the watery roots of heaven (13)

A little knowledge of landscape whets isolation.
This is a country of water,
of water and rigid trees
That flank it and fall beneath its weight.
They lie like stricken ministers, grey and unredeemed. (20)

Tree-shadows lying like limbed logs across the meadow,
Sinking into the hill's shadow that stalks them... (21)

I remember the way the mimosa tree
buttered the shade
Outside the basement bedroom, soaked in its yellow bristles. (1)

I love the winter light, so thin, so unbuttery,
Transparent as plastic wrap,
Clinging so effortlessly
to whatever it skins over. (14)


Pipistrello, and gun of motorcycles downhill,
A flirt and a gritty punctuation to the day's demise
And one-starred exhalation, (32)

Stars like motorcycle exhaust
Through the limp leaves of maple trees (33)

As these examples indicate, the descriptions pile up and provide a rich context for each other (keeping "unbuttery" fresh rather than weird), and the last image, in particular, has the weight of the whole book's seeing and thinking behind it. The narrative sections work this way too -- e.g. the story of the Hunter Gracchus is introduced in poem 9, and in poem 24 is applied to the quarter moon "like a sail with no ship / and no port to come home to." The straight-up philosophizing merges into the general currents of thought, too, but it's less compelling as writing than the bits that have their eye on the actual world.

One virtue that Wright's later verse tends to lack is tautness. The gentle meandering of this long poem might irritate some readers -- not me, surprisingly enough! -- who should still enjoy the poems collected in "Negative Blue" and earlier volumes.

Another work of genius
Few poets have been as successful at finding the spiritual in the ordinary as Charles Wright has -- Louise Gluck comes to mind, and possibly Jack Gilbert -- but even these titans have not represented the metaphysics of the quotidian as consistently and convincingly as Wright.In a large portion of Wright's poetry the setting is the same: Wright is sitting on his porch chair in his backyard -- sounds boring doesn't it -- but it's not -- because Wright's not just sitting in his backyard, he's sitting in eternity and beholding heaven with all of its rough edges.There is a gospel in the landscape, a language amid the peony blossoms and the sparrows.

brilliantlight
Just back from a few days in Charlottesville where I was able to read this out (and the series of poems in the current edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review) on the screened-in porch.Although the book is subtitled "a poem," it's really a cycle of well paced poems in which Wright brings us through meditations on aging, philosophy, and best guessed conclusions with linguistic certainty.If you've been lucky enough to have been reading Wright for a while, read this when you can.If you're new to the poet, it's a good place to start to begin a reading relationship that will challenge, relax, entertain, and satisfy. ... Read more

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Offers practical guidance and comprehensive coverage on all aspects of federal court jurisdiction and litigation procedure, as well as the relationship between the state and federal courts. Text reviews the federal judicial system; judicial power of the United States; diversity of citizenship; venue; pleadings, trials, and judgments; and appellate court jurisdiction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

I Love Charles Alan Wright
Wright's work is more technical than Glannons, but I used it for my civil procedure class, and I did extremely well in that class. I would buy both.

Quick summaries to get you through class and 1st year exams
If you are not understanding civil procedure and want something to clarify the rules or subject matter/personal jurisdiction, this is a good book to start.It provides clear summaries of the rules as well as the policydebates underlying issues raised in procedure.Keep in mind that this isnot a law review article, so in essence this book is more aimed atsummarizing all the critiques and debates that have gone on before ratherthan looking at the law from a different angle.But if you want a shortread that will get you through the exam, this book is just as about asuseful as anything else you might come across. There are professors whobase their classes on this book, as well as students who diligently readthis book every day to prepare for the socratic questions they can await inclass the next day.If you want good grades, though, I think it takes morethan reading all these horn books and what not.A lot of it just comesdown to the processing and understanding of the material, which can bedaunting at times and actually just comes at different times for differentpeople.However much you read these hornbooks, if you don't understand thestuff or can't apply it, it won't actually help you that much.

Succinct summaries of FRCP
This book is commonly used by first year students in civil procedure.I have known many students in the past who have found the book helpful in explaining the intricacies of the federal rules.A must read. ... Read more

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Called "the man who turns religion into love," Charles de Foucauld followed a winding path to his heart's true desire. After early years of wrenching loss, rebelliousness, unbelief in God, reckless adventure and the unbridled pursuit of pleasure, Charles experienced a profound conversion where he met God's mercy and love. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Amazing Story of a life.
Finally I just finished another new book Charles de Foucauld: Journey of the Spirit by Cathy Wright it is a biography that is an easy read, but the material and life it examines are so deep that you will have to come back to it again later. There is a great deal in this little volume and it wets one's thirst to find out more about de Foucauld or to find his own writings to devour. Here is a quote from one of his letters to leave off this post.

"Anything that doesn't lead us to that - to better know and serve God - is a waste of time."
-Charles de Foucauld ... Read more

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By 1910, the Antarctic was the last place on earth that had never been explored, and British naval officer Robert Scott was obsessed that an Englishman - specifically himself - should conquer the pole. Despite being under-funded, under-equipped and unprepared, Scott sailed south in the antiquated whaling ship, Terra Nova, in what everyone assumed would be a cracking good adventure.

The expedition was made up entirely of British adventurers, gadabouts and scientists, the exception being one Canadian, Charles Seymour (Silas) Wright. Born 1887 in Toronto, Charles Wright was studying physics in Cambridge when he heard Scott was looking for a physicist to join the expedition to the pole. By the time Wright inquired, Scott had chosen a physicist for the team but was short a glaciologist. Who else but a Canadian would know about glaciers? Wright became the expedition's glaciologist. Halfway through the rough passage to the Antarctic, Scott got word that a rival explorer, Norwegian Roald Amundsen, was also making a run for the pole and was close on their heels. What started out as a stroll to the South Pole became a race between two very determined and different men.

Arriving at their base camp on Cape Evans in January 1911, Scott's team soon discovered they were unprepared for the Antarctic, while equipment failures and food shortages compounded the hardship. For the final race to the pole, Scott stripped the team down to four men, and Wright did not make the cut. Scott reached the geographic South Pole only to find that Amundsen had beaten them by days. Bitterly disappointed, Scott and his companions returned to base camp, but were caught in a fierce Antarctic blizzard that raged for days. Too weak to pull their sleds and out of food and fuel, they froze to death. Ironically, as if to underscore the litany of errors that dogged the expedition, they perished only a few miles from a cache of food and fuel. Next spring Wright led a search party to look for the remains of Scott and his party, and it was the sharp-eyed Wright who spotted a small patch of green on a snowy landscape - the tent containing Scott and his companions' frozen bodies.

Wright returned to England and went on to do even more extraordinary things, including inventing trench wireless in WWI, and working closely with Winston Churchill, developing the technology to assist in the allied invasion of Europe in WWII which included developing the first radar installations and inventing the technology that neutralized German magnetic sea mines After a stint as naval attaché to Washington, D.C., and Director of Scripps Oceanographic institute in La Jolla, California, he retired to Salt Spring Island, BC, passing away in 1975. Typically Canadian, Wright was modest about his accomplishments, with few Canadians aware of his amazing life and the extraordinary impact he had on the 20th century.

Customer Reviews (2)

One of the best, if not the best book about Scott's 1911-1912 expedition
Return to Antarctica is one of the very best book written about the Scott 1910-1912 expedition. I've read everything printed about Antarctica's Heroic Period. What sets apart Adrian Reaside work is that you'll find inside tons of new information.

Numerous quotes from Silas Wright diary, from Griff Taylor's memoirs and so on. You'll learn what was the relation between all those characters and it's fascinating. We learn, for one thing, that Silas warned Bill Wilson that Scott's calculations about fuel and food rations on the South Polar Journey were all wrong, and he ask Uncle Bill to bring the matter up with Scott.

Naturally, Scott could not care less about the 24 years old opinion...

There are 3 or 4 factuals errors those who knows the Scott expedition real well will find, but those are easyly forgive when balanced with the enormous amount of new material and insights.

Go get the book, now.

Return to Antarctica: The Amazing Adventure of Sir Charles Wright on Robert Scott's Journey to the South Pole
This book detailing a generations-long exploration adventure came across as fascinating; author Adrian Raeside did not disappoint. After enlightening the reader of his family's history with explorer Robert Scott's rather obsessed voyages to "conquer" Antarctica, Raeside spells out an informative and slightly humorous look into the "discovery" of the continent, listing with care the many subsequent explorations attempted thereafter by various groups and countries.

Armed with unstinting research, family-held photographs and letters long stored away, Raeside paints a picture of the 1911 and 1912 expeditions of Scott and his crew, one that differed in many ways from the more legendary, "clean-shaven" version that he'd heard growing up. The reader learns of the experiments run by the crew of using snowshoes, VS skis, and how these simple tests aided future explorers. The included photographs depict a story all by themselves, but the maps Raeside drew of the smaller journeys taken--how far they got in so many days--were helpful in understanding better the frightful positions these men placed themselves in. This piece is a candid, studied look at an extreme journey, yet written with more familiarity than a mere documentary.

Reviewed by Meredith Greene ... Read more

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In graphic novel format, tells the story of how Wilbur and Orville Wright developed, tested, and successfully flew the first powered airplane. ... Read more

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Key Benefit: This book presents a sound mathematical treatment that increases smoothly in sophistication. Key Topics: The book presents utility-grade discrete math tools so that any reader can understand them, use them, and move on to more advanced mathematical topics. Market: A handy reference for computer scientists. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

shameful condition
I ordered this with other books. Some may have been new, some almost certainly weren't. However, in ordering used books I will never order books not claimed to be in somewhat decent condition.This Discrete Math book shocked me. It looks generally beaten up. It's well used and dog-eared. All forgiveable.The front cover has a big corner torn off which is simply 'replaced' with a doubled-up up back-to-back layer of sticky tape folded to the shape the book should be. Throughout the start of the book, chunks of pages are falling out..........If I had known and paid and expected a book like this it would be different - but I most certainly never had a hint of this being what would arrive.

Comparison of the top 3 Discrete Math Texts
I have read "Discrete Mathematics" by Epp, Rosen and Ross which are the three most common discrete math texts that I encounter at university.

Of these three, I would rate Epp's book as my favorite because it has the clearest explanations and is so easy to read that you can't help but feel like you understand all of the content completely.The only failing that Epp's book might have is that it is not as thorough in its coverage of the material as some of the more technical books.I would say that it covers about 90% of the material and leaves out some of the more obscure topics.

Rosen's book would be the most thorough, covering every topic in meticulous detail and offering a jumping point for other texts in cryptography and number theory.Although this book is more complete than Epp's, it is also less readable and requires more effort to get through.Ideally you would use Epp's book to learn the material and then go to Rosen's book for a technical reference.

For those of you who are considering Ross's book, I have one thing to say and that is don't.Although I have read this book and done a lot of the problems in the first 3/4 of the text, this book is neither clear in its explanations like Epp nor is it as complete as Rosen's book.If you are assigned this book for a course, my suggestion would be to buy Epp's book and photocopy the Ross homework problems from a friend's textbook.

Take the advice of someone who has read all three books.If you have to buy just one, then get the Epp book.It is better to understand 90% of the material completely rather than 100% of the material partially.

Very, very poor book
This is one of the worst books I ever purchased for a class (4th edition).The price is ridiculous and entirely undeserved.These authors take simple subjects and make them incomprehensible.The introduction to proofs in chapter 2 is a perfect example.They try to expose the concepts thru chatty dialog and fail miserably.The student is left more confused than before they read the material.Rosen's book is a lot better.

If this book is required for your course..
If this book is required for your course, then it means the publishing company's marketing machine has won over someone powerful in the department under which your course is managed.

It's sick how such a crappy book can "convince" many course coordinators to make it a required textbook.This book is marketed very well like James Stewarts' Calculus books (table props), but it's even worse than what Stewart puts out (hard to imagine!).

Not every scholar should write for students.
I was a student of Mr. Ross's, taking Discrete Math, a few years ago.He's is a very intelligent man and seemed to enjoy teaching.Unfortunately, he was not very good at it.And same goes for this text book of his.His attitude and approach in the classroom and the book's alike might be helpful if the student has already mastered the majority of the covered topics, in which case, this book becomes useless. ... Read more

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The Southwestern desert--that tumultuous "zone claimed by two nations, and controlled by no one"--is Charles Bowden's home and enduring passion. In acclaimed books ranging from A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior and Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family to Inferno and Exodus/Éxodo, Bowden has written eloquently about issues that plague the border region--the smuggling of drugs and people and the violence that accompanies it, the rape of the environment and the greed that drives it. Completing a trilogy that includes Inferno and Exodus/Éxodo, Bowden looks back in Trinity across centuries of human history in the border region to offer his most encompassing and damning indictment of "the murder of the earth all around me." Sparing no one, Bowden recounts how everyone who has laid claim to the Southwestern desert--Native Americans, Spain, Mexico, and the United States--has attempted to control and domesticate this ecologically fragile region, often with devastating consequences. He reserves special scorn for the U.S. government, whose attempts at control have provoked consequences ranging from the massive land grab of the Mexican War in the nineteenth century, to the nuclear fallout of the first atomic bomb test in the twentieth century, to the police state that is currently growing up around attempts to seal the border and fight terrorism. Providing a stunning visual counterpoint to Bowden's words, Michael Berman's photographs of the desert reveal both its harsh beauty and the scars it bears after centuries of human abuse. Bowden's clearest warning yet about the perils facing the desert he calls home, Trinity confirms that, in his words, "the [border] zone is a laboratory where the delusions of life--economic, religious, military, foreign policy, biological, and agricultural--can be tested. This time the edge is the center, this time the edge is the face of the future." ... Read more

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Comprised of Charles Bowden's informed and informative text with Michael P. Berman's superbly crafted photography
The desert country of the American southwest has impacted upon the international relationship of Mexico and the U.S. for more than 200 years. Today the area is prominently impacted by environmental degradation, political turmoil, the smuggling of people and drugs, and yet still presents the haunting and haunted beauty of the desert that continues to endure despite all that has been done and continues to be done by way of human greed upon its ecological fragility. "Trinity" is a 288-page compendium comprised of Charles Bowden's informed and informative text with Michael P. Berman's superbly crafted photography. Enhanced with the inclusion of extensive notes and a bibliography, "Trinity" is strongly recommended for academic and community library Environmental Studies reference collections, as well as the supplemental reading lists for environmentalists, policy makers, and the non-specialist general reader with an interest in the geology, flora and fauna of the American Southwest. ... Read more

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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 ofisolation.
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.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

More Greater Romantic Lyrics
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.

Wright's Mastery
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.

Full of wonder shared with human frailty
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.Heis 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.

compelling
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.

the latest from the master
"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. ... Read more

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The Lost Continent. please visit www.valdebooks.com for a full list of titles ... Read more

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This work offers a complete reader's guide and handbook to the late poetry of author Charles Wright. It begins with a study of the poems in Chickamauga (1995), the earliest of which were published in the late 1980s, and continues through the seven volumes that followed: Black Zodiac (1997), Appalachia (1998), North American Bear (1999), A Short History of the Shadow (2002), Buffalo Yoga (2004), Scar Tissue (2006), and Littlefoot: A Poem (2007). The author includes an annotated commentary for each of the 230 poems covered in the work, providing background information such as perceived influences, parallels to other poets, historical explanations, and biographical details. ... Read more