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A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright

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"A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright" is one of the most entertaining collections of American literary correspondence since Flannery O'Connor's "Habit of Being." The letters of poet and teacher James Wright, which have been selected and edited by his wife, Anne, and Professor Saundra Rose Maley, begin when he's a young man in the army in 1946 and continue through until his death by cancer in 1980.

If there is one salient trait that comes through in these letters, it is his deep compassion for others, the sense that James Wright was really a very nice guy. Despite bouts of poverty and chronic alcoholism, he never waxed cynical about the world or those around him.

His correspondence includes letters to Robert Bly, James Dickey, Mary Oliver, and Theodore Roethke, and Wright is at his most entertaining when he is related daily anecdotes.

In a letter to his friend, the poet Donald Hall, Wright wrote: "Whatever a poet has been in the past, right now he is defined, to me, as a man who has both the power and the courage to see, and then, to show, the truth through words. If I'm a bad poet, that means a liar."

The truth of James Wright resounds throughout these letters.