Littlefoot: A Poem [Paperback]

Charles Wright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 10, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0374531218 | ISBN-13: 978-0374531218

Littlefoot, the eighteenth book from one of this country’s most acclaimed poets, is an extended meditation on mortality, on the narrator’s search of the skies for a road map and for last instructions on “the other side of my own death.” Following the course of one year, the poet’s seventieth, we witness the seasons change over his familiar postage stamps of soil, realizing that we are reflected in them, that the true affinity is between writer and subject, human and nature, one becoming the other, as the river is like our blood, “it powers on, / out of sight, out of mind.” Seeded with lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, here we meet solitude, resignation, and a glad cry that while a return to the beloved earth is impossible, “all things come from splendor,” and the urgent question that the poet can’t help but ask: “Will you miss me when I’m gone?

Editorial Reviews

Review

"If Nature is a haunted house, as Emily Dickinson told us, and Art a house that tries to be haunted, then Wright has created in Littlefoot one of the most satisfyingly possessed landscapes of his career . . . Inside his lyric, there resides a world well beyond the ordinary . . . It is the heart and soul that he delivers so eloquently." —Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times

“Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs don’t often get mentioned in the works of Pultizer Prize-winning writers, but that’s precisely what puts Charles Wright in his unique position among contemporary poets. Somewhere in his work, layered with echoes of the masters, there is always room to connect his highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives . . . More often than not, [Littlefoot] is a celebration, which is something else that sets Wright apart . . . [Wright] speaks with a sadness that makes the uplifting moments quite credible. Mortality is as inescapable in Wright’s depiction of life as it is in life itself.” —Dionisio Martinez, Miami Herald

“By using a combination of short poetic sections and long and stepped-down lines, Wright blends dense, musical imagery with meditative longings to make a poetry that’s unique in the contemporary American scene.” —Michael Chitwood, The News & Observer (Raleigh)

“Charles Wright has been on the lookout for transcendence in his back yard for years.  His poems often examine the way an ordinary bit of perception or speech turns suddenly musical.  Wright’s back yard is his own little piece of the pastoral, world in which ease and wisdom coexist and  create each other, where Eastern mysticism merges with Southern laziness…In Littlefoot, a book-length poem, Wright continues in this way, this time with a greater attention paid to the particulars of his own life and death.” —Katie Peterson, The Chicago Tribue

“[Wright’s] long open verse lines mix genres and sources with seeming effortlessness, but he never stops thinking . . . In Wright’s poems, the mysteries of consciousness interface with the mysteries of natural beauty, and the music of the whole often leaves a lump in the throat.” —Tom D’Evelyn, Providence Journal

“For the past thirty-five years Charles Wright has been one of the most intriguing figures in our literary landscape…[There are] truly epic and monumental dimensions...[to his] work.” —Kevin Bowen, Harvard Review

About the Author

Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374531218
• ISBN-13: 978-0374531218
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,674,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another work of genius, August 7, 2007

By 

Jeffrey Slater (Salt Lake City, UT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Littlefoot: A Poem (Hardcover)

Few poets have been as successful at finding the spiritual in the ordinary as Charles Wright has -- Louise Gluck comes to mind, and possibly Jack Gilbert -- but even these titans have not represented the metaphysics of the quotidian as consistently and convincingly as Wright. In a large portion of Wright's poetry the setting is the same: Wright is sitting on his porch chair in his backyard -- sounds boring doesn't it -- but it's not -- because Wright's not just sitting in his backyard, he's sitting in eternity and beholding heaven with all of its rough edges. There is a gospel in the landscape, a language amid the peony blossoms and the sparrows.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant light, July 8, 2007

By 

Marcus Aurelius (PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Littlefoot: A Poem (Hardcover)

Just back from a few days in Charlottesville where I was able to read this out (and the series of poems in the current edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review) on the screened-in porch. Although the book is subtitled "a poem," it's really a cycle of well paced poems in which Wright brings us through meditations on aging, philosophy, and best guessed conclusions with linguistic certainty. If you've been lucky enough to have been reading Wright for a while, read this when you can. If you're new to the poet, it's a good place to start to begin a reading relationship that will challenge, relax, entertain, and satisfy.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars After Image-Picking, August 9, 2008

By 

Sarang Gopalakrishnan (Urbana, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Littlefoot: A Poem (Paperback)

One way to read "Littlefoot" is as an imagist's attempt to write a long poem. (Wright aptly calls himself an "image-picker" somewhere in this book.) It is a single poem rather than a sequence; in fact, the "plot" connecting nearby poems -- the progression of seasons -- is often clearer than the loose thematic connections between the segments of an individual poem. As Wright explained in "Apologia pro Vita Sua," his basic form is the journal. The "journal" -- of Wright's 70th year -- tracks his thoughts and surroundings from one October to the next. Wright has always been admired for his ability to write so interestingly about so little; in "Littlefoot," the subject matter has dwindled to essentially nothing, and the writing is as good as ever. All the poems are in Wright's usual two-step free verse line (lines that begin in lowercase are indented):

The great mouth of the west hangs open,
mountain incisors beginning to bite
Into the pink flesh of the sundown. (14)

When the rains blow, and the hurricane flies,
nobody has the right box
To fit the arisen in.
Out of the sopped earth, out of dank bones,
They seep in their watery strings
wherever the water goes.
Who knows when their wings will dry out, who knows their next knot? (1)

The stars drift like cold fires through the watery roots of heaven (13)

A little knowledge of landscape whets isolation.
This is a country of water,
of water and rigid trees
That flank it and fall beneath its weight.
They lie like stricken ministers, grey and unredeemed. (20)

Tree-shadows lying like limbed logs across the meadow,
Sinking into the hill's shadow that stalks them... (21)

I remember the way the mimosa tree
buttered the shade
Outside the basement bedroom, soaked in its yellow bristles. (1)

I love the winter light, so thin, so unbuttery,
Transparent as plastic wrap,
Clinging so effortlessly
to whatever it skins over. (14)


Pipistrello, and gun of motorcycles downhill,
A flirt and a gritty punctuation to the day's demise
And one-starred exhalation, (32)

Stars like motorcycle exhaust
Through the limp leaves of maple trees (33)

As these examples indicate, the descriptions pile up and provide a rich context for each other (keeping "unbuttery" fresh rather than weird), and the last image, in particular, has the weight of the whole book's seeing and thinking behind it. The narrative sections work this way too -- e.g. the story of the Hunter Gracchus is introduced in poem 9, and in poem 24 is applied to the quarter moon "like a sail with no ship / and no port to come home to." The straight-up philosophizing merges into the general currents of thought, too, but it's less compelling as writing than the bits that have their eye on the actual world.

One virtue that Wright's later verse tends to lack is tautness. The gentle meandering of this long poem might irritate some readers -- not me, surprisingly enough! -- who should still enjoy the poems collected in "Negative Blue" and earlier volumes.