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Title: Above the River: The Complete Poems by James Wright ISBN: 0-374-52282-0 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 May, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (6 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Sublime Poetry Slightly Flawed by Format
Comment: I hate to give this work anything less than 5-stars, because at the moment (and probably most future moments) I revere James Wright's poetry. He makes blue collar blackened river Ohio come alive riven death with darkness and life. So this book is a must for poetry lovers.
Where it distracts me is the attempts at completeness is a difficult editor's dilemma and one that doesn't serve the poet or the poet's reader well here. There are two James Wright's out there (this book presents three), as is true with most sublimated artist that pass through a learning phase before hitting on their voice, their style.
James Wright started as a formalist (not my favored style) hailing structure and rhyme sometimes at the expense of meaning and language (disclaimer...one man's humble opinion belies a personal taste and no two taste buds seem the same). The book of course being a complete work, offers all of those poems of bandied prose. And then the editor offers a bridge or break of sorts in Wright's translated works of German and Spanish poets. Wright was a great poet in English, but the gift of gifted translation should have been left to the likes of W.S. Merwin, Anthony Kerrigan, Charles Tomlinson, and Stephen Mitchell for Neruda, Paz, and Rilke.
So, Wright's "Above the River," really first breaks the surface on page 119 after his epiphany to all thing free form. It is then that his poetry sings darkly. I leave you with some of Wright's beautiful language (there's plenty to be had). Buy the book for the rest.
In Fear of Harvests
It has happened
Before: nearby,
The nostrils of slow horses
Breathe evenly,
And the brown bees drag their high garlands,
Heavily,
Toward hives of snow.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Life Examined
Comment: Above the River is so full of beautiful and painful lines, it's enought to make one believe in poetry again. His words are so evocative and yet also filled with the sadness of examination. Particularly good pieces are "Two Hangovers" and "A Blessing".
Rating: 4
Summary: flawless poetic mastery?
Comment: James Wright was of course one of the 20th century's great master poets. Each poem in this book bears his stamp of completely precise, beautiful communication. His writing can teach about the art. It does, though, seem kind of pretentious to me the way this one approach to poetry, which has its sense in it, is the only way for the words to be poetry, which James Wright must have believed or he wouldn't have done it that same way every time.
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Title: Walking to Martha's Vineyard: Poems by Franz Wright ISBN: 0375415181 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop ISBN: 0374518173 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 April, 1984 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke by Theodore Roethke ISBN: 0385086016 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 10 January, 1975 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Selected Levis (Pitt Poetry Series) by Larry Levis, David St. John ISBN: 0822957930 Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems Prose Reviews and Criticism (NORTON CRITICAL EDITIONS) by Adrienne Rich, Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Albert Gelpi ISBN: 0393961478 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 January, 1993 List Price(USD): $14.20 |
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