Buffalo Yoga: Poems

By Charles Wright

Book Overview

The sun has set behind the Blue Ridge, And evening with its blotting paper lifts off the light. Shadowy yards. Moon through the white pines --"Landscape with Missing Overtones" Never has Charles Wright's vision been more closely aligned with the work of the ancient Chinese painters and writers who inform his poetry than in his newest collection. Wright's short lyrics, in Charles Simic's words, "achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don't know what is" ( The New York Review of Books ). The poems in Buffalo Yoga are pristine examples of the Tennessee poet's deft, painterly touch--"crows in a caterwaul" are "scored like black notes in the bare oak"--and his oblique, expansive, and profound interrogation of mortality, as in the title sequence, where the soul is "a rhythmical knot. / That form unties. Or reties."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374117284
• ISBN13: 9780374117283
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.6" x 0.8" x 5.6"

Customer Reviews

On the road to find out

If you're going to read Charles Wright, start with his translations of Montale. Then dive into the books in the order in which they were written, and you'll have a good journey through one of the freshest voices in contempory poetry.