A Short History of the Shadow

Luminous new poems from one who "has long been a poet of gorgeous description" --William Logan, "The New Criterion"
"Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation."
"Don't just do something, sit there."
"And so I have, so I have, "
"the seasons curling around me like smoke, "
"Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound."
--from "Body and Soul II"
This is Charles Wright's first collection of verse since the gathering, in "Negative Blue," of his "Appalachian Book of the Dead," a trilogy of trilogies hailed "among the great long poems of the century" (James Longenbach, "Boston Review"). In "A Short History of the Shadow," Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.