Littlefoot A Poem [Paperback]

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 change over his familiar postage stamps of soil, realizing that we are reflected in them, that the true affinity is between writer and subject, human and nature, one becoming the other, as the river is like our blood, it powers on, / out of sight, out of mind. Seeded with lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, here we meet solitude, resignation, and a glad cry that while a return to the beloved earth is impossible, all things come from splendor, and the urgent question that the poet can't help but ask: Will you miss me when I'm gone?

If Nature is a haunted house, as Emily Dickinson told us, and Art a house that tries to be haunted, then Wright has created inLittlefootone of the most satisfyingly possessed landscapes of his career . . . Inside his lyric, there resides a world well beyond the ordinary . . . It is the heart and soul that he delivers so eloquently. Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times

Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs don't often get mentioned in the works of Pultizer Prize-winning writers, but that's precisely what puts Charles Wright in his unique position among contemporary poets. Somewhere in his work, layered with echoes of the masters, there is always room to connect his highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives . . . More often than not, [Littlefoot] is a celebration, which is something else that sets Wright apart . . . [Wright] speaks with a sadness that makes the uplifting moments quite credible. Mortality is as inescapable in Wright's depiction of life as it is in life itself. Dionisio Martinez, Miami Herald

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