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    Appalachia: Poems
    Appalachia: Poems
    Appalachia: Poems
    Ebook81 pages41 minutes

    Appalachia: Poems

    By Charles Wright

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Almost thirty years ago, Charles Wright (who teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry) began a poetic project of astonishing scope--a series of three trilogies. The first trilogy was collected in Country Music, the second in The World of the Ten Thousand Things, and the third began with Chickamauga and continued with Black Zodiac. Appalachia is the last book in the final trilogy of this pathbreaking and majestic series.

    If Country Music traced "Wright's journey from the soil to the stars" and The World of the Ten Thousand Things "lovingly detailed" our world and made "a visionary map of the world beyond" (James Longenbach, The Nation), this final book in Wright's great work reveals a master's confrontation with his own mortality and his stunning ability to discover transcendence in the most beautifully ordinary of landscapes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9781466877467
    Appalachia: Poems
    Author

    Charles Wright

    Charles Wright is the United States Poet Laureate. His poetry collections include Country Music, Black Zodiac, Chickamauga, Bye-and-Bye: Selected Later Poems, Sestets, and Caribou. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. Born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee in 1935, he currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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    Reviews for Appalachia

    3.5/5

    20 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Charles Wright is a spiritual poet who questions everything including his questions. He is a poet of nature who suspects that nature has a trick up her sleeve. Landscape and language interplay and he asks much of both, received much, but never enough.

      In this collection, he reads from an imagined "Appalachian Book of the Dead" and takes us deep into wonder, and fear, and hope, and resignation, "Until there is nothing else" but silence.
    • 3/5
      Charles Wright's poems about Appalachia focus mainly on the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. A few poems in the collection are set in other locations around the world such as Italy. The book contains many references to the poet's well-known poem "The Appalachian Book of the Dead." It is not included in the small volume but five sequel poems and numerous references to the original poem are scattered through its pages. This is the final volume in the author's apparently unnamed trilogy. (Chickamauga and Black Zodiac are the earlier volumes.) Most of the poems included did little to make me appreciate them overall. I did appreciate a few lines here and there. His quotation of an old spiritual in one of the sequels to "The Appalachian Book of the Dead" brought back memories of hearing a favorite Southern Gospel quartet sing it about forty-five to fifty years ago.
    • 3/5
      I just can't figure this work out. I tried, damn it, I tried. It leaves me cold, confused, and vaguely wishing I was smarter.

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    Appalachia - Charles Wright

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