Alabama Booksmith

Description

This important book--shot through with reflections on, explorations of, and hymns to both our natural and spiritual realms--features the three poetry collections Charles Wright published during the 1980s: The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), and Zone Journals (1988).
Charles Wright has won, among other honors, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the Academy of American Poets' 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
This artful yet earthy book fully reveals the keen, candid, and reflective thinking and writing that have made Charles Wright one of America's most beloved—and honored—contemporary poets. Throughout The World of the Ten Thousand Things we find his typically insightful and journal-like reflections on, explorations of, and hymns to both our natural and spiritual realms.

Collecting poems from Wright's The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), Zone Journals (1988), and Xionia (1990), this book is itself "a single poetic sequence," as Richard Tillinghast has noted, "worthy of comparison with such extended works as The Bridge by Hart Crane, The Far Field by Theodore Roethke, and Dream Songs by John Berryman."
"Since the early 1980s, Wright has increasingly abandoned short lyrics for journal poems that weave diverse thematic threads into a single autobiographical fabric . . . [He] is at liberty to spin out extended meditations that pick up, work with, lay aside, and return again to landscapes, historical events, and ideas . . . Wright's gift for verbal music, his ability to evoke sensory experience and a boldness of metaphorical reference, get the juices flowing . . . [He is] a poet of great purity and originality."—Richard Tillinghast, The New York Times Book Review

"There is no poet of his generation whose career has unfolded with such genuine authority as Charles Wright's, or whom I read with more astonishment and gratitude. There is no book published this year [1990] I could recommend more highly."—J.D. McClatchy, Poetry

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

"Since the early 1980s, Wright has increasingly abandoned short lyrics for journal poems that weave diverse thematic threads into a single autobiographical fabric. . . . [He] is at liberty to spin out extended meditations that pick up, work with, lay aside, and return again to landscapes, historical events, and ideas. . . . Wright's gift for verbal music, his ability to evoke sensory experience and a boldness of metaphorical reference get the juices flowing. . . . [The World of the Ten Thousand Things is] a single poetic sequence worthy of comparison with such extended works as "The Bridge" by Hart Crane, "The Far Field" by Theodore Roethke, and "Dream Songs" by John Berryman. . . . [Wright is] a poet of great purity and originality."--Richard Tillinghast, The New York Times Book Review

"There is no poet of his generation whose career has unfolded with such genuine authority as Charles Wright's, or whom I read with more astonishment and gratitude. There is no book published this year I could recommend more highly."--J.D. McClatchy, Poetry