Buffalo Yoga: Poems [Hardcover]

Charles Wright (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374117284 | ISBN-13: 978-0374117283 | Publication Date: April 1, 2004 | Edition: 1st

The sun has set behind the Blue Ridge,
And evening with its blotting paper
lifts off the light.
Shadowy yards. Moon through the white pines
--"Landscape with Missing Overtones"

Never has Charles Wright's vision been more closely aligned with the work of the ancient Chinese painters and writers who inform his poetry than in his newest collection. Wright's short lyrics, in Charles Simic's words, "achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don't know what is" (The New York Review of Books). The poems in Buffalo Yoga are pristine examples of the Tennessee poet's deft, painterly touch--"crows in a caterwaul" are "scored like black notes in the bare oak"--and his oblique, expansive, and profound interrogation of mortality, as in the title sequence, where the soul is "a rhythmical knot. / That form unties. Or reties."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Over more than 30 years, Wright's long-lined, even-paced, meditative verses have seemed at once resigned and sublime: frequent topics include Chinese painters and poets, Italian landscapes and America's upper South, especially the Blue Ridge mountains where he makes his Charlottesville home. After the ambitious suites of volumes like Black Zodiac and Chickamauga (which picked up a brace of awards, including a Pulitzer), Wright has settled into shorter, self-contained poems in most of this 17th book: "I write, as I said before, to untie myself, to stand clear," he writes in a Zen-like vein. The title poem (at 13 pages, by far the longest) wanders thoughtfully through landscape and memory before resolving into an elegy for a friend. As always, Wright sets his desire to believe in another world against his confidence that we can know only one: "Under our heads, the world is a long drop and an ache." Wright returns to his Southern heritage ("my own little Civil War," "a half-healed and hurting world") but concentrates more often, this time out, on artists and their lives: Kafka, Morandi, Ezra Pound, Mark Rothko and Thomas Chatterton all turn up. Wright's real subject, as always, is larger than it seems: though they may vary little from poem to poem, his extended, loping lines project a patient point of view that, like a kind of stretch that sometimes releases painful histories, continues to open space.
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From Booklist

Wright, one of the most honored of American poets, reflects on the most familiar of subjects--sun, moon, wind, clouds, trees--but, as he observes, "it's never the same day twice." Indeed, his penetrating and ravishingly gorgeous lyrical poems are at once classically philosophical and freshly revealing. For Wright, the brimming natural world is holy, yet he anthropomorphizes nature with rampant inventiveness, intimacy, wit, and wonder. This meshing of the divine and the human is his meditation point and the source of his ongoing inquiry into life's grand interconnectivity and the nature of the soul. Buffalo Yoga, the title of this elegantly contemplative collection and of the long, enrapturing poem at its heart, evocatively names the union between nature and human consciousness. And as he marvels over everything from the great wheel of the seasons to flowers and fog, considers our notions of time and the afterlife, and remembers his past, Wright, a profoundly yogic poet, illuminates and exalts in the entire astonishing spectrum of existence. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (April 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374117284
• ISBN-13: 978-0374117283
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,212,496 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars On the road to find out, December 28, 2006

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This review is from: Buffalo Yoga: Poems (Hardcover)

If you're going to read Charles Wright, start with his translations of Montale. Then dive into the books in the order in which they were written, and you'll have a good journey through one of the freshest voices in contempory poetry.