Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems

by Charles Wright

Overview

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 overnight
On 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 earth
that grind us to grain-out.
—from "Still Life with Spring and Time to Burn"

When Charles Wright published Appalachia in 1998, it marked the completion of a nine-volume project, of which James Longenbach wrote in the Boston Review, "Charles Wright's trilogy of trilogies—call it 'The Appalachian Book of the Dead'—is sure to be counted among the great long poems of the century."

The first two of those trilogies were collected in Country Music (1982) and The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990). Here Wright adds to his third trilogy (Chickamauga [1995], Black Zodiac [1997], and Appalachia [1998]) a section of new poems that suggest new directions in the work of this sensuous, spirit-haunted poet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374527730
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/09/2001
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Charles Wright received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1983 for Country Music, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1995 for Chickamauga, and the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 for Black Zodiac.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"There are precious few contemporary poets in whose work I find as much sheer wisdom as in Wright's. . . . His ascetic discipline is an instruction and an aesthetic. The whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, slow circle around Wright's grave influence."—David Baker, Poetry

"Truly an event. One of our national treasures has been watching us and listening to us for decades, and [Negative Blue] is proof that he's watched and listened well. . . . One of the remarkable things about Wright is precisely what happens in the back yard, on the front lawn, or at a cafe. His poems are visions of things ethereal, but even with all their luminescence and otherworldly shades, they remain within earshot of a lawn mower starting up or cicadas announcing the hour."—Dionisio D. Martinez, Miami Herald

"[Wright is] a master craftsman who if asked would humbly call himself a journeyman, for the mastery of an art form, as Pound said, is the work of a lifetime."—Eric Pankey, Verse

"In an age of casual faithlessness, Wright successfully reconstitutes the provocative tension between belief and materialism."—Albert Mobilio, The Village Voice

Editorial Reviews

There are precious few contemporary poets in whose work I find as much sheer wisdom as in Wright's. . . . His ascetic discipline is an instruction and an aesthetic. The whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, slow circle around Wright's grave influence.” —David Baker, Poetry

“Truly an event. One of our national treasures has been watching us and listening to us for decades, and [Negative Blue] is proof that he's watched and listened well. . . . One of the remarkable things about Wright is precisely what happens in the back yard, on the front lawn, or at a cafe. His poems are visions of things ethereal, but even with all their luminescence and otherworldly shades, they remain within earshot of a lawn mower starting up or cicadas announcing the hour.” —Dionisio D. Martinez, Miami Herald

“[Wright is] a master craftsman who if asked would humbly call himself a journeyman, for the mastery of an art form, as Pound said, is the work of a lifetime.” —Eric Pankey, Verse

“In an age of casual faithlessness, Wright successfully reconstitutes the provocative tension between belief and materialism.” —Albert Mobilio, The Village Voice

From the Publisher

It is the sign of a mature poet to admit that he has been talking about one thing for 30 years and then to confess, with childlike wonder, what that thing is: "Wind like big sticks in the trees..." However, it is precisely this dispersion of expectation that Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Wright has developed into a lifelong song of what cannot be said. Negative Blue tracks ten years of the Appalachian poet's descriptions of the incommunicable with selected poems from his final "trilogy of trilogies," along with new poems that push further into the "unseen and nightlong."

There is a thick musicality in Wright's poems that urges you to ruminate on the sounds of the words before even considering their meaning. The constant beats and switchbacks of soft and hard sounds accumulate on your tongue. The subjects of the poems, when there is a discernible, traditional subject, dissipate under the weight of heavy descriptions. His liberal use of hyphens and the repetition of sounds produce a tight clacking of sound images that conjure up the sound of small drums as much as any visual counterpoint:

      Spring's sap-crippled, arthritic, winter-weathered, myth limb,
      Whose roots are my mother's hair.

The poems in Negative Blue are remarkable for their sharpness of language. Wright is a master at fingering through the spectrum of language to secure that rare, particular word that both fits perfectly and at the same time unhinges the reader with its unfamiliarity. His modernist upbringing in the footsteps of Pound and Eliot has imbued his poetry with a strong sense of the disordering of the world still struggling with the endless attempt to get at the ultimate sense of things through words.

This inherent brokenness of the world comes through in both form and meaning in Wright's poetry. Narrative fragments, prayer, meditation, homage to other poets, humor, and the loose repetition of sounds gather in force to emphasize the entropic play of life. Yet, the poet is too aware of falling into a cheap description of the chaos of the world and continually intertwines a polished beauty of possible meaning into his verses. He is indebted to such Chinese poets as Tu Fu and Li Po with their strong convictions of the relativity of things and the impenetrable nature of the world. In "After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard" he writes:

      The sky dogs are whimpering.
      Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
            up from the damp grass.
      Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
      Go quietly, quietly.

In both Wright's literary inspirations and his personal style, there is a struggle between the attempt to mentally dissect life and an urge to surrender to its sheer happening. He is certainly on the side of the academic buttress, working from the wealth of both East and West and of literature and art, to further this fight with himself. Yet, the many allusions and provocations he draws from old books and sharp thoughts become quickly extraneous when he falls back into the rhythm of the natural world.

The poet's acute awareness of the movement and lessons of nature, and of humans within this world, is certainly the most potent element to his verses. Wright's involvement in the intricate presence of the "inside-out of the winter gum trees" and the "dead lemon leaves" really frees the reader from the mental hammering that often turns his poetry into heavy aphorisms. The rich, kaleidoscopic detail is truly alive when the rough beat-beat of his voice submits to what it is describing:

      Bloodless, mid-August meridian,
      Afternoon like a sucked-out, transparent insect shell,
      Diffused, and tough to the touch.
      Something about a labial, probably,
            something about the blue.

Wright is an autobiographical poet, and this new collection is the culmination of 30 years of his spiritual rummaging through the books and hills of the earth. He is a poet of the old order, the rare breed who is sensitive to every movement around him and within him. From his childhood in rural Tennessee to the distant piazzas of Italy and the wisdom of the T'ang dynasty, Negative Blue confirms that his journey has led ever further and deeper into himself.

—Justin Frimmer

bn.com

The widely esteemed Virginia-based poet collects a decade's worth of striking description and laid-back meditation in this sample of work from his last three books: the energetic Chickamauga, the introspective (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) Black Zodiac and the elegiac Appalachia. Leaping and skating among apothegms and visual intricacies, Wright's skeins of beautiful lines offer the shifting emotional textures of his day-to-day thought and experience: "Into the world tumult," he advises his poems, "into the chaos of every day,/ Go quietly, quietly." "Landscape's a lever of transcendence," he writes, though elsewhere he insists he's just setting down impressions--"Journal and landscape I tried to resuscitate both." Wright's "verbal amulets" chronicle the world's imperviousness to our words for it, and our stubborn and lambent need to find those words--one description of the Blue Ridge or the Adriatic claims to respond to an ancient Chinese poet, the next to a contemporary philosopher. Wright's power lies less in whole poems than in lines within them: those linear strengths owe something to Ezra Pound, and something more to the antiphonal balances of the Psalms. Wright ends the volume with seven new short poems: sometimes lugubrious, sometimes rapturous, they focus more than ever on aging and loss--"time, the true dissolver, eats away at our fingertips." "I've talked about one thing for thirty years,/ and said it time and again," another new poem declares; in an important sense all Wright's recent career makes up one poem, a continual, often compelling exploration of seeing, thinking and the dialectic between them--at one moment Wright is declaring "Whatever has been will be again,/ unaltered, ever returning"; at the next he's drawn to the "Serenity of the rhododendrons, pink and white." (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly