Book description
Co-winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry, Country Music is
comprised of eighty-eight poems selected from Charles Wright's first
four books published between 1970 and 1977. From his first book, The
Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this
selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand
passions: his desire to reclaim and redeem a personal past, to make a
reckoning with his present, and to conjure the terms by which we might
face the future," writes David St. John in the forward. These
poems, powerful and moving in their own right, lend richness and insight
to Wright's recently collected later works. "In Country Music we
see the same explosive imagery, the same dismantled and concentric (or
parallel) narratives, the same resolutely spiritual concerns that have
become so familiar to us in Wright's more recent poetry," writes
St. John. "Charles Wright is certainly among the most important
poets of his generation . . . if not indeed the single most important of
those poets."--Georgia Review CHARLES WRIGHT was born in Pickwick
Dam, Tennessee, and grew up in rural Tennessee and North Carolina. In
addition to the four volumes selected from here, he published four
volumes in the 1980s, which have been collected in The World of Ten
Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990. He is currently Professor of English
at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
