"[Wright's] penetrating and ravishingly gorgeous lyrical poems are at once classically philosophical and freshly revealing" (Booklist)

Never has Charles Wright's vision been more closely aligned with the work of the ancient Chinese painters and writers who inform his poetry than in his newest collection. Wright's short lyrics, in Charles Simic's words, "achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don't know what is" (The New York Review of Books). The poems in Buffalo Yoga are pristine examples of the Tennessee poet's deft, painterly touch-"crows in a caterwaul" are "scored like black notes in the bare oak"-and his oblique, expansive, and profound interrogation of mortality, as in the title sequence, where the soul is "a rhythmical knot. / That form unties. Or reties."

Praise

"[Wright] finds the sublime in the unlikeliest places, and at his best makes you think such places are exactly where to look." --William Logan, The New Criterion

About the Author(s)

Charles Wright

Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

photo: © Nancy Crampton