No attentive reader would ever mistake Wright's evocative, sprawling poems for poems by anyone else; many readers, however, find it hard to tell his mature works apart. Wright (who won the Pulitzer for 1997's Black Zodiac) follows up Negative Blue
(2000) with a moody, winning collection that plays to his long-recognized strengths: balanced and lengthy musical lines; ambling meditation; beautiful Blue Ridge landscapes; nods to American, Italian and Chinese poets; and a self-aware, pragmatist-cum-Taoist resignation to the fleetingness of all things. "Caught in the weeds and understory of our own lives," Wright says in the opening poem, "proper attention is our refuge now, our perch and our praise." That attention migrates through his evocative collocations of phrase and detail. Two striking suites of short poems with long titles use anaphora and prayer to explore mortality and the night sky: "The late September night is a train of thought, a wound/ That doesn't bleed"; "O Something, be with me, time is short." Another suite, "Relics," swerves from a similar plan into distractingly elaborate allusions to Wallace Stevens. The concluding set of poems, called "Body and Soul," lists "Nightmemories, night outsourcings," deciding that "Ephemera's what moves us." Few readers will see much departure from Wright's work of the 1980s and 1990s; many, however, will be fine with that. (Apr.)
Forecast:Besides his 1997 Pulitzer, Wright (who teaches at the University of Virginia) has racked up almost every other major award, including the National Book Award (1983) and the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize (1995). Those accolades may not translate into attention to this new volume, pubbed during a busy poetry month and closely following Wright's last, larger book.
