(Larger Image)
|
Chickamauga: Poems
by Charles Wright
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1996-04-01)
ISBN: 0374524815
EAN: 9780374524814
Dewy Decimal #: 811.54
Paperback: 96 pages
SKU: T081816-5365
Condition: Very Good
|
Editorial Reviews
|
Product Description
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 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.'"
|
Amazon.com Review
As he juggles his inquiries about language, landscape, memory, and God throughout the six groups of short poems that make up Chickamauga, Wright refuses to reach for the easy conclusion. In this, his poems embody Keats's notion of "negative capability": the ability to consider multiple concepts without "irritably reaching after fact." "We're placed between now and not-now," as he writes in "Reading Lao Tzu Again in the New Year." Wright's scope is admirably broad, and he endows the familiar with new shadows. In "Sprung Narratives" he considers what he's learned in the 30 years since a trip to Italy, and concludes, "Unlike a disease, whatever I've learned / Is not communicable." Instead of trying to explain with a vocabulary wherein "each word / Is a failure," Wright tells himself to: Sit still and lengthen your lines,
Shorten your poems and listen to what the darkness says
With its mouthful of cold air.
Born in Tennessee in 1935, Wright now teaches at the University of Virginia. He grounds his mystic's poetry in a Southerner's physical world. But like Charlie Citrine, hero of Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, Wright betrays provincial expectations by inquiring into the most subtle and nuanced states. The grace one finds in Wright's poems is universal; his Blue Ridge easily becomes Mt. Fuji, Mt. Olympus, or Kilimanjaro. A craftsman, he understands the limits of his tools. In "Aftermath," for instance, he confides, "We who would see beyond seeing / see only language, that burning field." Through his rarefied country music, though, Wright holds out a branch of hope: "Loss is its own gain. / Its secret is emptiness."
|
Customer Reviews
|
If Heidegger could write poetry...
Rating  (5)
Date: 2002-01-15
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
his verse would look and sound rather like the lines written by Charles Wright, since here one finds powerful meditations on the thrown-ness of existence; on the way we shape and are shaped by forces and impulses that swirl and rage within and without us; on the depths as well as heights of temporality; and on the fact that there is something when there could have been nothing at all. For some reason, I find myself thinking of the great Welsh poet, RS Thomas, whenever I pause and read Wright. That's probably unfair, but their sense that God is in the silences between noise, in the fissure between what our mind can verify and the demands that are made on our soul -- these things bring them together, at least in my mind. This is a fine collection of poems.
|
|
One of the must read poetry books of the last twenty years
Rating (5)
Date: 1998-12-07
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Charles Wright's Chickamauga is an outstanding collection of poetry. It is both very modern and deeply traditional in its feelings with parallels to Chinese poetry and to the work of Wallace Stevens. The poems use landscape and memory of his Italian years to link us to the basic human experiences of life: ageing, loss etc. They seem a great step forward from his previous books, like the Zone Jounals and China Traces, and at least equal to his most recent book Black Zodiac. I found it both beautiful and deeply moving.
|
|
an excellent piece of work to be read by poets and non-poets
Rating (5)
Date: 1997-02-23
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Charles Wright`s book of poems is the most moving book
of poetry I have read in a long time.He speaks to the soul
as well as the heart.My only problem with Charles Wright is
he doesn't have any other books out that I can find.Thanks for
an enjoyable night of reading your book.I would of given
a ten but the book was to short.
|
|
|