Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

Selected Poems

James Wright; Edited by Robert Bly and Anne Wright

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

opens in a new window
opens in a new window Selected Poems Download image

ISBN10: 0374529027
ISBN13: 9780374529024

Trade Paperback

176 Pages

$17.00

CA$23.00

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

More than any other poet of his generation, James Wright spoke to the great sadness and hope that are inextricable from the iconography of America: its rail yards, rivers, cities, factories, and vast if vanishing natural beauty. Speaking in the unique lyrical voice that he called his "Ohioan," Wright created poems of immense sympathy for sociey's alienated and outcast figures and also of ardent wonder at the restorative power of nature.

Selected Poems fills a significant gap in Wright's bibliography: that of an accessible, carefully chosen collection to satisfy both longtime readers and those just discovering his work. Edited and with an introduction by Wright's widow, Anne, and his close friend the poet Robert Bly, who also wrote an introduction, Selected Poems is a personal, deeply considered collection of work with pieces chosen from all of Wright's books. It is an overdue—and timely—new view of a poet whose life and work encompassed the extremes of American life.

Reviews

Praise for Selected Poems

"James Wright wrote with more heart than any other North American poet of the 20th century."—Rodney Jones, Parnassus

"[Wright's] poems, with their grace and intelligence, not only stand as a rebuke to most of the glib work of his time, but remain among the finest examples of the midcentury American lyric. The poems continue, as a phrase from one of them puts it, to break into blossom."—J. D. McClatchy, The New York Times Book Review

"One of America's greatest poets of the second half of the 20th century . . . In compacting Wright's devastating vision and language into this volume, the editors have performed the marvelous task of identifying what made Wright a master of modern verse."—Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review

"[Wright was] a tough, touching poet who, while never relinquishing his Midwestern roots, found ways to grow as a poet."—The New Republic

Reviews from Goodreads