Sestets is the nineteenth book from one of the country’s most acclaimed poets, a masterpiece of formal rigor and a profound meditation on nature and mortality. It is yet another virtuosic showcase for Charles Wright’s acclaimed descriptive powers, and also an inquiry into the nature of description itself, both seductive and dangerous: “a virtual world/ Unfit for the virtuous.” Like his previous books, Sestets is seeded with the lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, and “there is always room to connect his highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives” (Miami Herald). Soaring and earthy, lyrical and direct, Charles Wright is an American treasure, and his search for a truth that transcends change and death settles finally on the beauties of nature and language: “Time is a graceless enemy, but purls as it comes and goes.”
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From Publishers Weekly
Wright's gifts for single long lines, simple description and lyrical sound effects are second to none; he is the recipient of almost every American poetry award, including the Pulitzer. Even so gifted a poet, though, risks repeating himself after 18 books; the longer poems had begun to look like collections of interchangeable lines, however beautiful. If Wright was in a rut, this 19th book has found a neat way out. The 69 poems here, not unlike most of his earlier work, show vistas from the Upper South and points of view derived from Taoism, but they share a self-limiting form that is fresh for Wright: each has only six lines, plus a (sometimes quite long) title. In these sestets great yearnings and brief descriptions collide, cancel or reinforce each other: The heart of the world lies open, leached and ticking with sunlight/ For just a minute or so, says one poem. In another, The past is so dark, you need a flashlight to find your own shoes. Mortality is omnipresent, but so is beauty, in and around Charlottesville (where Wright teaches), in our musical heritage, in the night sky. Wright's compression tries to see that every subject, every image, receives its due. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
Praise for Littlefoot: “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, The Los Angeles Times
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5.0 out of 5 stars
In Praise of What Is Missing,
This review is from: Sestets: Poems (Paperback)
I have been a fan of Charles Wright since I found Chickamauga remaindered in a used bookstore. It made me go back and reread an earlier book of his that hadn't impressed me and I realized that I hadn't been ready as a reader in that moment. Of course, when I go back and reread poets I did like at that time I realize that Heraclitus was a very wise man.
I was eager to read Sestets because I like shorter poems and I wanted to see what Wright did with this form. I have to admit that I like the results. Wright can't let go of the long line so he uses enjabment quite frequently which makes me savor the sound of each line. It also slows me down so I don't read a poem in one big gulp. Wright has a great sense of place and that comes through in these poems; however, it is not his usual of Charlottesville, Tennessee, or Italy. I get the feel that he is writing many of these in the West although it doesn't matter and I could be geographically challenged. What does matter is the voice. Wright imbues these sixty-nine poems with a sense of impending loss and yet joy of the quotidian world. His is a sure voice that doesn't hesitant to be profound, whimsical, and attuned. I'm a sucker for a good title and Wright has quite a few in Sestets. This book may not convert new fans (although it should), but if you liked anything you have read by Wright before then you will not be disappointed in Sestets.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointed,
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This review is from: Sestets: Poems (Paperback)
I found these works, with a few exceptions, quite opaque. My ignorance, laziness or a nude literary emperor? I don't know.
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