A Short History of the Shadow: Poems

Author: Charles Wright

Number of Pages: 96

Luminous new poems from one who has long been a poet of gorgeous description –William Logan, The New Criterion Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation. Don’t just do something, sit there. And so I have, so I have, the seasons curling around me like smoke, Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound.–from Body and Soul II This is Charles Wright’s first collection of verse since the gathering, in Negative Blue, of his Appalachian Book of the Dead, a trilogy of trilogies hailed among the great long poems of the century (James Longenbach, Boston Review). In A Short History of the Shadow, Wright’s return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.