Charles Wright
March 29, 2004
Charles Wright is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critic's Circle Award for Black Zodiac (1998) and the National Book Award for Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1983). His poems crystallize the space between memory and imagination. Critic David Penn has said Wright's poems bring "a sense of poem-making that's as exquisite as a blueprint by Taniguchi or a castle made of sand." Wright's poetry, whether drawing from the experiences of his rural Tennessee youth or his years studying Buddhism, steadily works towards transcendence and transformation. Perhaps poet Donald Justice puts it the most succinctly, "A Wright poem is an expedition into the territory of the beautiful."
His books include Buffalo Yoga (2004); A Short History of the Shadow (2002); Negative Blue (2000); Appalachia (1998); The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990; Zone Journals (1988); Hard Freight (1973); two volumes of criticism; and an award-winning translation of Eugenio Montale's The Storm and Other Poems (1978). He teaches at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
