Charles Wright

Black Zodiac

Charles Wright

• 1998 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
• 1997 LATimes–Poetry winner
• 1997 NBCC–Poetry winner
• Score: 30.48

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.”

Chickamauga: Poems

Charles Wright

• 1996 Lenore Marshall winner
• 1996 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• Score: 16.46

This volume, Wright’s eleventh book of poetry, is a vivid, contemplative, far-reaching, yet wholly plain-spoken collection of moments appearing as lenses through which to see the world beyond our moments. Chickamauga is also a virtuoso exploration of the power of concision in lyric poetry—a testament to the flexible music of the long line Wright has made his own. As a reviewer in Library Journal noted: “Wright is one of those rare and gifted poets who can turn thought into music. Following his self-prescribed regimen of purgatio, illuminato, and…

Scar Tissue: Poems

Charles Wright

• 2007 Griffin International winner
• Score: 10.57

In his new collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality—“thing is not an image”—but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject—language and “the ghost of god.” And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, “something un-ordinary persists.”

Country Music: Selected Early Poems

Charles Wright

• 1983 NBA–Poetry winner
• Score: 10.33

A compilation of powerful and moving poems from early in the poet’s career.

The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990

Charles Wright

• 1991 LATimes–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.41

This important book—shot through with reflections on, explorations of, and hymns to both our natural and spiritual realms—features the three poetry collections Charles Wright published during the 1980s: The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), and Zone Journals (1988).