Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems

Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems

<p>The culmination of the cycle that won Wright the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award</p><p><i>Time will append us like suit coats left out overnight</i><br><i>On a deck chair, loose change dead weight in the right pocket,</i><br><i>Silk handkerchief limp with dew,</i><br><i> sleeves in a slow dance with the wind.</i><br><i>And love will kill us--</i><br><i>Love, and the winds from under the earth</i><br><i> that grind us to grain-out.</i><br>--from "Still Life with Spring and Time to Burn"</p><p>When Charles Wright published <i>Appalachia </i>in 1998, it marked the completion of a nine-volume project, of which James Longenbach wrote in the <i>Boston Review</i>, "Charles Wright's trilogy of trilogies--call it 'The Appalachian Book of the Dead'--is sure to be counted among the great long poems of the century."</p><p>The first two of those trilogies were collected in <i>Country Music</i> (1982) and <i>The World of the Ten Thousand Things</i> (1990). Here Wright adds to his third trilogy (<i>Chickamauga </i>[1995], <i>Black Zodiac</i> [1997], and <i>Appalachia </i>[1998]) a section of new poems that suggest new directions in the work of this sensuous, spirit-haunted poet.</p>