Chickamauga Poems [Paperback]

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.Chickamaugais 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 inLibrary Journalnoted: Wright is one of those rare and gifted poets who can turn thought into music. Following his self-prescribed regimen of purgatio, illuminato, and contemplatio, Wright spins one lovely lyric after another on such elemental subjects as sky, trees, birds, months, and seasons. But the real subject is the thinking process itself and the mysterious alchemy of language: 'The world is a language we never quite understand.'

Charles Wrightis the United States Poet Laureate. His poetry collections includeCountry Music,Black Zodiac,Chickaqmauga,Bye-and-Bye: Selected Later Poems,Sestets, andCaribou. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. Born in Pickwick Dam, Tennesee in 1935, he currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In his generation, the generation of Ashbery, Rich, Ammons, Ginsberg, Plath, and Merrill, Wright is perhaps closest to Plath in his intensity of the image, closest to Ammons in his sense of the sidereal. But he sounds like nobody else, and he has remained faithful to insights and intuitions--of darkness as of light--less than common in contemporary America. Helen Vendler, The New Republic

Chickamaugamarks a new turning point in Wright's career . . . Like [Wallace] Stevens'sThe Rock,Chickamaugais the result of a self-consciously imposed limitation . . . Most of Wright's new poems fit neatly on one page, and, if lĪ