Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems

Wright's poems mix a relentless intensity with the capacity to take inspiration from almost anything—passing thoughts, feelings and memories; other writers; whatever's out the window or nearby in the room. Wright is nothing if not prolific, and this third selected volume gathers poems from his last five books, published since the late 1990s, including the complete text of the book-length poem "Littlefoot," which asserts, "You can't go back,/ you can't repeat the unrepeatable." In Wright's trademark stepped lines, all of these poems—which find a voice not unlike a darker W.S. Merwin—are sobered by assertions like the above, but also by intense notes of ecstasy, which, it turns out, is not always quite pleasant: "Each second the earth is struck hard/ by four and a half pounds of sunlight." Wright is at his most distilled (though also at his most repetitive) in the six-line poems of Sestets, his most recent book, which fix an unearthly glare on thing after thing, yielding, more often than not, cold wisdom: "It is not possible to imagine and feel the pain of others./ We say we do but we don't./ It is a country we have no passport for,/ and no right of entry." (Apr.)