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    Black Zodiac: Poems
    Black Zodiac: Poems
    Black Zodiac: Poems
    Ebook126 pages1 hour

    Black Zodiac: Poems

    By Charles Wright

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

    Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 15, 2014
    ISBN9781466877412
    Black Zodiac: 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 Black Zodiac

    3.5/5

    31 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      That fire’s the light our names are carved in.

      Ultimately fatigue triumphed over delight.
      I sorely need to reread the concluding third of this book as my eyes burned from a forced march of a day. The poet is not to blame. There is a just a desire, a hope to make things better.

      The language in this tome is precisely jagged. There are exquisite images here this collection, ones as rapturous as the wounds of Saint Sebastian as evocative as the arc light craters outside Phnom Penh.

      Everyone indulge and expiate.
    • 2/5
      Quick, easy reading, but I can't seem to remember one detail about even one of the poems.
    • 3/5
      I really, really, really wanted to like this book, which won one of the major prizes-- a Pulitzer or a National Book Award or something. I can't figure it out.

    Book preview

    Black Zodiac - Charles Wright

    1

    APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA

    I

    How soon we come to road’s end—

    Failure, our two-dimensional side-kick, flat dream-light,

    Won’t jump-start or burn us in,

    Dogwood insidious in its constellations of part-charred cross points,

    Spring’s via Dolorosa

    flashed out in a dread profusion,

    Nowhere to go but up, nowhere to turn, dead world-weight,

    They’ve gone and done it again,

    dogwood,

    Spring’s sap-crippled, arthritic, winter-weathered, myth limb,

    Whose roots are my mother’s hair.

    Landscape’s a lever of transcendence—

    jack-wedge it here,

    Or here, and step back,

    Heave, and a light, a little light, will nimbus your going forth:

    The dew bead, terminal bead, opens out

    onto a great radiance,

    Sun’s square on magnolia leaf

    Offers us entrance—

    who among us will step forward,

    Camellia brown boutonnieres

    Under his feet, plum branches under his feet, white sky, white noon,

    Church bells like monk’s mouths tonguing the hymn?

    Journal and landscape

    —Discredited form, discredited subject matter—

    I tried to resuscitate both, breath and blood,

    making them whole again

    Through language, strict attention—

    Verona mi fe’, disfecemi Verona, the song goes.

    I’ve hummed it, I’ve bridged the break

    To no avail.

    April. The year begins beyond words,

    Beyond myself and the image of myself, beyond

    Moon’s ice and summer’s thunder. All that.

    The meat of the sacrament is invisible meat and a ghostly substance.

    I’ll say.

    Like any visible thing,

    I’m always attracted downward, and soon to be killed and assimilated.

    Vessel of life, it’s said, vessel of life, brought to naught,

    Then gathered back to what’s visible.

    That’s it, fragrance of spring like lust in the blossom-starred orchard,

    The shapeless shape of darkness starting to seep through and emerge,

    The seen world starting to tilt,

    Where I sit the still, unwavering point

    under that world’s waves.

    How like the past the clouds are,

    Building and disappearing along the horizon,

    Inflecting the mountains,

    laying their shadows under our feet

    For us to cross over on.

    Out of their insides fire falls, ice falls,

    What we remember that still remembers us, earth and air fall.

    Neither, however, can resurrect or redeem us,

    Moving, as both must, ever away toward opposite corners.

    Neither has been where we’re going,

    bereft of an attitude.

    Amethyst, crystal

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