Luminous new poems from one who "has long been a poet of gorgeous description" —William Logan,
The New Criterion
Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.
Don't just do something, sit there.
And so I have, so I have,
the seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound.
—from "Body and Soul II"
This is Charles Wright's first collection of verse since the gathering, in
Negative Blue
, of his "Appalachian Book of the Dead," a trilogy of trilogies hailed "among the great long poems of the century" (James Longenbach,
Boston Review
). In
A Short History of the Shadow
, Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.