Black Zodiac: Poems [Paperback]

Charles Wright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 4, 1998

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Black Zodiac concentrates on Charles Wright's considerable poetic endowment into a new poignance that has to be termed religious. Some of the poems achieve an authentic gnosis in a rapt mode of negative transcendence."--Harold Bloom

"Black Zodiac occupies the position in Wright's career that The Auroras of Autumn holds in Wallace Stevens's: Having long since mastered his characteristic voice, the poet has passed through the terrifying moment when mastery threatens to become mannerism, and he has emerged as a poet whose every line seems completely recognizable and at the same time utterly fresh."--James Longenbach, The Nation

"Combines an impeccable musical and prosaic sense with the kind of humility possessed by the masters."--Carol Muske, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 4, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374525366
• ISBN-13: 978-0374525361
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #325,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The "seasons" of Charles Wright, April 16, 2000

By 

Sara Connell - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Zodiac: Poems (Paperback)

These are the themes that I see in Wright's work: seasons, a journey, memory, "God", landscape, the power of language, the power of silence, the politics of place and time and particularly, the process/effects of grief, in many senses. "Black Zodiac" continues Wright's relationship to the play among time, place, and seasons. In this book of poems, I think there is an increasing sense of the interplay of memory and "aging." Wright's poems offer a look into solitary, yet common, moments when we speak the "truth" to ourselves....for example he asks, "What are the determining moments of our lives?/How do we know them?/ Are they ends of things or beginnings?" Another key, and pressing, theme to this book is Wright's struggle over agency-- do you give yourself over to "nature", to the "landscape", or try to negotiate the always-human tendency to control life's outcomes? Is this even a choice? He says, "To someone starting out on a long journey...take it easy..../Relax, let's what's taking take you..." This is an important and powerful collection of poetry...from a brilliant poet with a deep, and critical, understanding of language.

5.0 out of 5 stars & wholly modern, April 7, 2003

By 

I X Key "burningfield" (tomorrow) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Zodiac: Poems (Paperback)

This book is a beautifully eloquent, quiet meditation on so many mysteries & philosophies, influenced by both western & eastern canons.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars voice, and time, October 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Black Zodiac: Poems (Paperback)

each time i read it i find a different favorite poem, formidible ways of addressing understood mystries