Scar Tissue: Poems

More fluid and cyclic than other work I've read by Wright, these poems may not be for fans of Wright's earlier work, but I'd say they're more accessible and enjoyable for the average poetry reader (well, if such a thing exists). The poems mingle ideas of memory and scarring with lasting images, Wright's language so evocative that some of the poems are nearly unforgettable, and beg for rereading. There were many poems here that stalled my reading, forcing me to linger, and in the end I have to say that this feels the most polished and rawly emotional of what I've read from Wright....and I loved every moment of it. Absolutely recommended.

This 2006 collection by Charles Wright describes the "scar tissue" of living and of nostalgia for real or imagined better times. Wright is not a "nature poet" so much as a philosophical one as Coleridge described Wordsworth, one who uses his relationship with nature to explore and expose life's challenge of finding meaning. The experience of sunset becomes an analogy for human biography:

"If night is our last address
This is the pace we moved from,
Backs on fire, our futures hard-edged and sure to arrive....

"And where are we headed for?
The country of Narrative, that dark territory
Which spells out our stories in sentences, which gives them an end and beginning..."

Wright's poetry challenges us---not with obscurity or experimental language, show more but with living fully awake and aware, where "Something unordinary persists,/ Something unstill, neversleeping, just possible past reason."

The time spent being so challenged is well worth it. show less

Lots of pretty images and not a whole lot else. Here are some of my favourite quotes though.

A God-fearing agnostic, / I tend to look in the corners of things, / Those out-of-the-way places, / The half-dark and half-hidden, / the passed-by and over-looked, / Whenever I want to be sure I can't find something. / I go out of my way to face them and pin them down.
--Confessions of a Song and Dance Man

Some things move in and dig down / whether you want them to or not. / Like pieces of small glass your body subsumes when you are young, / They exit transformed and easy-edged / Many years later, in middle age, when you least expect them, / And shine like Lot's redemption. / College is like this, a vast, exact, / window of stained glass / That show more shatters without sound as you pass, / Year after year disappearing, unnoticed and breaking off. / Gone, you think, when you are gone, thank God. But look again. / Already the glass is under your skin, / already the journey's on.
--College Days

Our lives, it seems, are a memory / we had once in another place.
--Transparencies

Whatever the root sees in the dark is infinite. / Whatever the dead see is the same.
--Scar Tissue

New skin over old wounds, colorless, numb. / Let the tongue retreat, let the heart be dumb.
--Scar Tissue II show less