Caribou
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A powerfully moving meditation on life and the beyond, from one of our finest American poets
Charles Wright's truth—the truth of nature, of man's yearning for the divine, of aging—is at the heart of the renowned poet's latest collection, Caribou. This is an elegy to transient beauty, a song for the "stepchild hour, / belonging to neither the light nor dark, / The hour of disappearing things," and an expression of Wright's restless questing for a reality beyond the one before our eyes ("We are all going into a world of dark . . . It's okay. That's where the secrets are, / The big ones, the ones too tall to tell"). Caribou's strength is in its quiet, wry profundity.
"It's good to be here," Wright tells us. "It's good to be where the world's quiescent, and reminiscent." And to be here—in the pages of this stirring collection—is more than good; Caribou is another remarkable gift from the poet around whose influence "the whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, slow circle" (Poetry).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Musician says, beauty is the enemy of expression./ I say expression is the enemy of beauty./ God says, who gives a damn anyway" that's how Wright tells a joke. Indeed, his latest collection (after 2013's Bollingen Prize winning Bye-and-Bye) is a dexterous balance of lightness in dark. Split in three parts, all named for things cast off or left over "Echoes," "End Papers," "Apocrypha" the book is rife with nihilism, humor, and beauty: "This is as old man's poetry,/ written by someone who's spent his life/ Looking for one truth./ Sorry, pal, there isn't one./ Unless, of course, the trees and their blow-down relatives/ Are part of it./ Unless the late-evening armada of clouds/ Spanished along the horizon are part of it." To Wright, careful observation of the world and the self is the closest we can come to God: "I tried to make a small hole in my life, something to slip through/ To the other side." As for dealing with a metaphysical lack, even if "e live beyond the metaphysician's fingertips," and "here is no metaphor, there is no simile,/ and there is no rhetoric/ to nudge us to their caress... The trees remain the trees, God help us." Wright once again delivers the kind of poetry we cannot imagine poetry without.
