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    Chickamauga: Poems
    Chickamauga: Poems
    Chickamauga: Poems
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Chickamauga: Poems

    By Charles Wright

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    About this ebook

    This volume, Wright's eleventh book of poetry, is a vivid, contemplative, far-reaching, yet wholly plain-spoken collection of moments appearing as lenses through which to see the world beyond our moments. Chickamauga is also a virtuoso exploration of the power of concision in lyric poetry--a testament to the flexible music of the long line Wright has made his own. As a reviewer in Library Journal noted: "Wright is one of those rare and gifted poets who can turn thought into music. Following his self-prescribed regimen of purgatio, illuminato, and contemplatio, Wright spins one lovely lyric after another on such elemental subjects as sky, trees, birds, months, and seasons. But the real subject is the thinking process itself and the mysterious alchemy of language: 'The world is a language we never quite understand.'"

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9781466877498
    Chickamauga: 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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    • 5/5
      This is one of the few poetry books I still read; each poem triggers something different with each reading. Wright possesses a great ability to interpose landscape with memory.

    Book preview

    Chickamauga - Charles Wright

    AFTERMATH

    Sitting Outside at the End of Autumn

    Three years ago, in the afternoons,

                                             I used to sit back here and try

    To answer the simple arithmetic of my life,

    But never could figure it—

    This object and that object

    Never contained the landscape

                                                           nor all of its implications,

    This tree and that shrub

    Never completely satisfied the sum or quotient

    I took from or carried to,

                                                  nor do they do so now,

    Though I’m back here again, looking to calculate,

    Looking to see what adds up.

    Everything comes from something,

                                               only something comes from nothing,

    Lao Tzu says, more or less.

    Eminently sensible, I

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