Over the course of nineteen collections of poems, Charles Wright has built "one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century" (David Young, Contemporary Poets). Bye-and-Bye, which brings together selections from Wright's more recent work-including the entirety of Littlefoot, Wright's moving, book-length meditation on mortality-showcases the themes and images that have defined his mature work: the true affinity between writer and subject, human and nature; the tenuous relationship between description and actuality; and the search for a truth that transcends change and death.
Bye-and-Bye is a wonderful introduction to the late work of one of America's finest and best-loved poets.
"Has any other American poet been writing as beautifully and daringly over the past twenty-five years as Charles Wright? Possibly. But I cannot imagine who it would be … Wright has a hunk of the ineffable in his teeth and he won't let go. In poem after poem he plumbs our deepest relationships with nature, time, love, death, creation."
Phillip Levine, American Poet citation for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
"[Wright's] images, changing with the seasons, set the musical tone for each poem, and they are conceived in a manner that never ceases to astonish … 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
"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 meditate, slow circle around Wright's grave influence."
