Black Zodiac: Poems

By Charles Wright

Book Overview

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."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374525366
• ISBN13: 9780374525361
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

& wholly modern

This book is a beautifully eloquent, quiet meditation on so many mysteries & philosophies, influenced by both western & eastern canons.

voice, and time

each time i read it i find a different favorite poem, formidible ways of addressing understood mystries

The "seasons" of Charles Wright

These are the themes that I see in Wright's work: seasons, a journey, memory, "God", landscape, the power of language, the power of silence, the politics of place and time and particularly, the process/effects of grief, in many senses. "Black Zodiac" continues Wright's relationship to the play among time, place, and seasons. In this book of poems, I think there is an increasing sense of the interplay of memory and "aging." Wright's poems offer a look into solitary, yet common, moments when we speak the "truth" to ourselves....for example he asks, "What are the determining moments of our lives?/How do we know them?/ Are they ends of things or beginnings?" Another key, and pressing, theme to this book is Wright's struggle over agency-- do you give yourself over to "nature", to the "landscape", or try to negotiate the always-human tendency to control life's outcomes? Is this even a choice? He says, "To someone starting out on a long journey...take it easy..../Relax, let's what's taking take you..." This is an important and powerful collection of poetry...from a brilliant poet with a deep, and critical, understanding of language.

Language is the key...

Charles Wright, while the 20th century was settling down to its own special oblivion, silently has become one of America's most important poets. His love for language is always evident in his writing. I have come to welcome his poetry into my world. I know that before I am through with a Wright poem I will come across a line so perfect I will want to weep. Black Zodiac, in keeping with Wright's upward surge, is a brilliant piece of work. This volume is part 2 of a trilogy he began with Chicamauga. Years from today the world will look upon Wright as, perhaps, America's most important poet and surely will consider Black Zodiac as one of his most important works.