The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990

Why isn't Charles Wright's name on the lips of everyone who cares about language and being and the world? His poetry embodies immanence. It's a perpetual challenge, and I welcome its demands and delights.

This book is a collection of four of Wright's poetry books, written between 1980 and 1990. Wright is a past winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, so as you might imagine, this is a nicely written collection. Wright's poems explore memory, language, death, time, seasons, nature, and all that good poetic stuff, but they are firmly rooted in experience, his personal past, and the geography and natural beauty of the places that surround him. Most of the poems are two or three pages long, although some are as short as half a page, and a few are much longer -- including a forty-page journey through a single year. While the themes and style are consistent across the collection, we still see Wright change his show more focus and play with different tones and formats as the collection progresses.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2011/03/world-of-ten-thousand-things-poems-1980.ht... ] show less