EBOOK
About
The selected works of one of our finest American poets
The thread that dangles us
between a dark and a darker dark,
Is luminous, sure, but smooth sided.
Don't touch it here, and don't touch it there.
Don't touch it, in fact, anywhere-
Let it dangle and hold us hard, let it flash and swing.
-from "Scar Tissue"
Over the course of his work-more than twenty books in total-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). Oblivion Banjo, a capacious new selection spanning his decades-long career, showcases the central themes of Wright's poetry: "language, landscape, and the idea of God." No matter the precise subject of each poem, on display here is a vast and rich interior life, a mind wrestling with the tenuous relationship between the ways we describe the world and its reality.
The thread that dangles us
between a dark and a darker dark,
Is luminous, sure, but smooth sided.
Don't touch it here, and don't touch it there.
Don't touch it, in fact, anywhere-
Let it dangle and hold us hard, let it flash and swing.
-from "Scar Tissue"
Over the course of his work-more than twenty books in total-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). Oblivion Banjo, a capacious new selection spanning his decades-long career, showcases the central themes of Wright's poetry: "language, landscape, and the idea of God." No matter the precise subject of each poem, on display here is a vast and rich interior life, a mind wrestling with the tenuous relationship between the ways we describe the world and its reality.
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Reviews
"[An] exquisite assembly of selected poems from Wright's prodigious output . . . One may lose track of self and time within Wright's radiant poems, trusting that this great poet . . . might help us hear our own language, decipher our own feelings, as if for the first time."
Raúl Niño, Booklist (Starred review)
"Oblivion Banjo is a major work of American poetry by a poet who draws the reader into the inner workings of his imagination as few others do. Hundreds of years from now, if American poetry is still being read, I believe that Wright's work will survive as a testament to the power of language to navigate and chart one complex soul."
Susan L. Moore, Commonweal Magazine
"Wright's poetry is driven by a trembling wonder before existence, and by a profound sense of mortality . . . Reading the abundance collected in Oblivion Banjo"
17 volumes over four decades or so, the work of a lifetime