eBook2 (2)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
A compilation of powerful and moving poems from early in the poet's career.
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819572264 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2022 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 182 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
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.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE GRAVE OF THE RIGHT HAND
Aubade
Over Govino Bay, looking up from the water's edge, the landscape resembles nothing so much as the hills above Genova, valleying into the sea, washing down olive, cypress and excessive arbutus into the slow snapping of the plane trees where I, surrendering to the pulse beat of a silence so faint that it seems to come from another country, watch the sun rise over Albania, waiting — calmly, unquestioning — for Saint Spiridion of Holy Memory to arise, leave his silver casket and emerge, wearing the embroidered slippers, from his grove of miracles above the hill.
Corfu
The Poet Grows Older
It seemed, at the time, so indifferent an age that I recall nothing of it except an infinite tedium to be endured. I envied no one, nor dreamed of anything in particular as, unwillingly, I enveloped myself in all of the various disguises of a decent childhood. Nothing now comes to mind of ever embarking upon famous voyages to the usual continents; of making, from the dark rooms and empty houses of my imagination, brilliant escapes from unnatural enemies; or, on rainy winter afternoons in an attic, of inventing one plot or counterplot against a prince or a beast. ... Instead, it must have been otherwise.
I try to remember, nevertheless, something of all that time and place, sitting alone here in a room in the middle of spring, hearing the sound of a rain which has fallen for most of April, concerned with such different things, things done bv others. ... I read of the aimless coups in the old dynasties from Africa to Afghanistan, their new republics whose lists of war lords alone are enough to distress the Arvan tongue; of intricate rockets in search of a planet, soon, perhaps to land in a country somewhere outside the pedestrian reach of reason; of the latest, old sailor's account of a water dragon seen bathing off the grizzled coast of Scotland. ... It is at times such as this, and without thinking, really, clothed in my goat's-wool robes, that I steal a camel from an outlying Arabian stable, gather together my clansmen, and gallop for days along the miraculous caravan trails to Asia.
The Voyage
At first I was overly cautious, procedure being all-important. I gathered around me those I considered friends, discovering, with a certain shock, a mere handful — nothing else, however, was lacking, as I had for months assembled equipage, and such rudiments as maps of cities, tidal charts, coastal readings, cryptic dictionaries, and guides to unusual monuments. Only, in assuring readiness, I had planned too well. ... As it was, this much should have been warning.
For days on end we waited, close by the north-east docks, admiring the stubborn tugs at work, studying the sea lanes. Such depths of perfect skies over the gaudy ships, outward-bound through the gay whistles of sea birds! ... And at night the glide and swish of well-oiled engines, the long calls of the horns. ... The weeks lengthened, our patience thickening. Then something altered, if imperceptibly at first: perhaps some quirk of the weather, perhaps of the sea. A little later and it was unmistakable: things tended to incline together, fogging distinctions, ships became less common, and schedules grew erratic; destinations became unsure in my head; the nights were longer, and with them there was the uncontrollable desire for sleep, up till then only vaguely recalled. Eventually, even, some of my friends, sharers of the voyage, vanished....
It is so difficult to come back, perspectives blunted, and to have only the waiting, now in the shuttered light, in the clutter of objects here in this drafty attic, until all is in readiness once more. Soon, perhaps, we shall go back down. But then, what stingy cargo to reload, what slackened baggage, O my stunted puppets!
Nocturne
The weeds have thickened among the orchards and leaves dangle unnoticed under the archways. At nighttime, before, where torchlight once peeled the darkness back from the lawn mosaics, from the formal gardens, where, it has been rumored, the parties attained such a perfection that Bacchus himself, angered at certain contests staged in his name, peered in one twilight, then ordered his image stricken from the household, his paeans discontinued, all is unshingled by the moon. Occasional chords from a ghostly lute, it is true, will sometimes come down the same Alpine wind that continues to herd the small waters into the shore; or a strayed traveller, or some misguided pilgrim might, of a summer evening, if he stands quite still and says nothing, imagine he hears the slight off-rhythm of some hexameter line deep in the olive grove, as the slither of night birds moves toward the darker trees. But that is all.
Grotte di Catullo, Sirmione
Storm
And when, that night, the unseasonable rain (the hail a shredding sound in the lemon trees) thudded against the lumbering of the bay, in August, haunting the dark with a querulous whiteness, he retired to the basement room under the house to study the various aspects of water, the ships in sudden counterpoint on the rising scales of the sea, and to wait for the breakthrough, across the barren hills of his brain, of the bronze soldiers, for the swelling flash of their knives.
Positano
CHAPTER 2HARD FREIGHT
Homage to Ezra Pound
Past San Sebastiano, past
The Ogni Santi and San Trovaso, down
The Zattere and left
Across the tiered bridge to where
— Off to the right, half-hidden —
The Old Dogana burns in the spring sun:
This is how you arrive.
This is the street where Pound lives,
A cul-de-sac
Of rheumy corners and cracked stone,
At whose approach the waters
Assemble, the gulls cry out;
In here — unspeaking, unturned — he waits,
Sifting the cold affections of the blood.
* * *
Others have led the way,
Vanishing in their sleep, their beds
Unmade, the sheets still damp
From what has set them apart —
Cancer or bad lungs, the wrack
Of advancing age, the dull
Incense of suicide ...
And he has survived,
Or refused to follow, and now
Walks in the slow strobe of the sunlight,
Or sits in his muffled rooms,
Wondering where it went bad,
And leans to the signal, the low
Rustle of wings, the splash of an oar.
* * *
Today is one of those days
One swears is a prophesy:
The air explicit and moist,
As though filled with unanswered prayers;
The twilight, starting to slide
Its sooty fingers along the trees;
And you, Pound,
Awash in the wrong life,
Cut loose upon the lagoon (the wind
Off-shore, and gaining), the tide going out ...
Here is your caul and caustic,
Here is your garment,
Cold-blooded father of light —
Rise and be whole again.
Venice
Homage to Arthur Rimbaud
Laying our eggs like moths
In the cold cracks of your eyes,
Brushing your hands with our dark wings
— Desperate to attempt
An entrance, to touch that light
Which buoys you like a flame,
That it might warm our own lives —,
We cluster about your death
As though it were reachable.
For almost a hundred years
We've gathered outside your legend (and been afraid
Of what such brilliance affords;
And knew the while you were risen, your flight
Pneumatic and pure, invisible as a fever;
And knew the flight was forever,
Leaving us what we deserve:
Syllables, flowers, black ice;
The exit, the split cocoon ...
Charleville
Homage to Baron Corvo
Of all the poses, of all the roles,
This is the one I keep: you pass On the canal, your pope's robes Aflame in a secret light, the four Oars of your gondola white As moth wings in the broken dark,
The quail-eyed fisher-boys Sliding the craft like a coffin out to sea;
The air grows hard; the boat's wake Settles behind you like a wasted breath.
* * *
(For months, Corvo, you floated through my sleep As I tried to track you down:
That winter you lived in a doorway;
The days and nights on these back canals You spent in a musty blanket,
Your boat both bed and refuge —
And writing always The book, the indescribable letters ...
Was it the vengeance only That kept you alive, the ripe corkscrew Twisted and deep in the bottle's throat?
One afternoon — in the late spring — I went
To San Michele, to see
The sealed drawer that holds your name,
To take you flowers, as one
Is moved to do for the dead, and found
Not even a vase to put them in.
Leaving, I spread them on the lagoon,
Ungraftable shoots of blood. There is, you said,
A collusion of things in this world ...)
* * *
And so you escape. What books there are,
Old hustler, will never exhume you,
Nor places you stayed.
Hadrian, Nicholas Crabbe, you hide
Where the dust hides now,
Your con with its last trick turned,
Stone nightmare come round again —
Fadeout: your boat, Baron, edges
Toward the horizon, a sky where toads,
Their eyes new fire,
Alone at the landings blink and blink.
Venice
Homage to X
The red earth, the light diffuse
In the flat-leaved limbs of the trees;
A cold, perpetual rain
As though from a heaving breast;
O loved ones, O angels ...
* * *
The thing, as always, begins
In transit, the water infusion
Oily and phosphorescent —
The vine is a blue light,
The cup is a star.
* * *
In the dream you will see a city,
Foreign and repetitious,
The plants unspeakably green;
That is of no concern; your job
Is the dust, the belly-relinquishing dust.
* * *
It's the day before yesterday,
It's the other side of the sky:
The body that bears your number
Will not be new, will not be your
own And will not remember your name.
Prague / Prague-Strashnitz
The New Poem
It will not resemble the sea.
It will not have dirt on its thick hands.
It will not be part of the weather.
It will not reveal its name.
It will not have dreams you can count on.
It will not be photogenic.
It will not attend our sorrow.
It will not console our children.
It will not be able to help us.
Portrait of the Poet in Abraham von Werdf's Dream
Outside, the Venice skyline, and stars
Half-seen through an opened window;
Inside, it's the Renaissance,
The men in hose,
The furnishings elegant, but spare;
A griffin rears in the archway;
An eagle dives from the ceiling;
And over the far wall — like Dürer's —
Two cherubs support the three
Disordered initials of my signature.
Paper is stacked in neat piles, as I
First drew them; square blocks of type, their beds
Tilted and raised, their letters reversed,
Glisten among the shadows;
Two men in the foreground work
A press, inking and setting; a third
Is washing his hands, kneeling
In front of a tub; a fourth, his right arm
Extended, adjusts the unused type;
A fifth is correcting proof.
Alone in an alcove, a sixth man, unnoticed
And unfamiliar, his strange clothes
Centuries out of date, is writing, his back turned
To what I tried to record.
The lines, a spidery darkness, move
Across the page. Now
He looks this way. And now he rises
— XYZ, his mouth says, XYZ —,
Thrusting the paper into my hands.
These words are the words he has written.
Chinoiserie
Why not? The mouths of the ginger blooms slide open,
The willows drag their knuckles across the earth;
Each year has its fields that no one tends.
Our days, unlike the long gasps of the wind,
Stay half in love with the rushes, and half with the water reeds.
Outside the body, all things are encumbrances.
One Two Three
A shift in the wind the darkness
Beading about your eyelids
The sour pull of the blood
Everything works against you
The way the evening comes down
Its trellises one rose at a time
The watery knots of light
That lap at your memory
The way you thought of your life once
An endless falling of seeds
* * *
Already places exist
Which cannot reshelter you
Hands you have clasped for the last time
Familiar mirrors remain
That will not contain your face
Words you have uttered
That will not remember your tongue
The sofas that held your sleep
Gradually rise to assume
Their untouched shapes and their dreams
* * *
The wave will deliver you
Your arms thrown out like driftwood the shore
Eroding away at your touch
Your fingers ingrained in its loose skin
The idea of absence
Sprouting like grass from your side
Your autobiography
Completed no less than what
Always you claimed it would be the stone
That no one will roll away
White
Carafe, compotier, sea shell, vase:
Blank spaces, white objects;
Luminous knots along the black rope.
* * *
The clouds, great piles of oblivion, cruise
Over the world, the wind at their backs
Forever. They darken whomever they please.
* * *
The angel, his left hand on your left shoulder;
The bones, in draped white, at the door;
The bed-sheets, the pillow-case, your eyes.
* * *
I write your name for the last time in this mist,
White breath on the windowpane,
And watch it vanish. No, it stays there.
* * *
White, and the leaf clicks; dry rock;
White, and the wave spills.
Dogwood, the stripe, headlights, teeth.
Firstborn
— Omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt —
1.
The sugar dripping into your vein;
The jaundice rising upon your face like a blush;
The glass box they keep you in —
The bandage over your eyes;
The curdled milk on your lips;
The plastic tube in your throat —
The unseen hands that linger against your skin;
The name, like a new scar, at your wrist;
The glass box they keep you in —
We bring what we have to bring;
We give what we have to give;
Welcome, sweet Luke, to your life.
2.
The bougainvillaea's redress
Pulses throughout the hillside, its slow
Network of vines
Holding the earth together, giving it breath;
Outside your window, hibiscus and columbine
Tend to their various needs;
The summer enlarges.
You, too, enlarge,
Becoming accessible,
Your liquid reshufflings
Protracted and ill defined,
Yet absolute after all, the new skin
Blossoming pink and clear.
3.
You lie here beside me now,
Ineffable, elsewhere still.
What should one say to a son?
Emotions and points of view, the large
Abstractions we like to think
We live by — or would live by if things
Were other than what they are;
Or we were; or others were;
If all were altered and more distinct?
Or something immediate,
Descriptive, the virtuous use of words?
What can one say to a son?
4.
If it were possible, if
A way had been overlooked
To pull that rib of pure light
Out of its cage, those few felicitous vowels
Which expiate everything ...
But nothing has been left out,
Nothing been overlooked.
The words remain in the dark, and will
Continue to glitter there;
No tricks we try to invent,
No strategies, can now extract them.
And dust is dust for a long time.
5.
What I am trying to say
Is this — I tell you, only, the thing
That I have come to believe:
Indenture yourself to the land;
Imagine you touch its raw edges
In all weather, time and again;
Imagine its colors; try
to imitate, day by day,
The morning's growth and the dusk,
The movement of all their creatures;
Surrender yourself, and be glad;
This is the law that endures.
6.
The foothills of Tennessee,
The mountains of North Carolina,
Their rivers and villages
— Hiwassee and Cherokee,
The Cumberland, Pisgah and Nantahala,
Unaka and Unicoi —
Brindle and sing in your blood;
Their sounds are the sounds you hear,
Their shapes are the shapes you see
Regardless, whenever you concentrate
Upon the remembered earth
— All things that are are lights.
Slides of Verona
1. Here where Catullus sat like snow Over the Adige the blooms drift West on the west-drifting wind
2. Cangrande mellifluous ghost sails His stone boat above the yard
3. St George and Trebizond each Elsewhere still hold their poses still burn
4. Death with its long tongue licks Mastino's hand affection he thinks Such sweetness such loyalty
5. Here comes Whatever Will Come His shoulders hunched under lost baggage
6. Two men their necks broken hang Opposite where the hill once was And that's where the rainbow ends
7. The star of the jasmine plant Who follows you now who leads
8. The great gates like wings unfold The angel gives him a push The rosaries click like locks
9. White glove immaculate touch How cold you are how quiet
Grace
Its hair is a fine weed,
Matted, where something has lain,
Or fallen repeatedly:
Its arms are rivers that sink
Suddenly under the earth,
Elbow and wristbone: cold sleeve:
Its face is a long soliloquy,
A language of numerals,
Impossible to erase.
Negatives
This is the light we dream in,
The milk light of midnight, the full moon
Reversing the balance like shapes on a negative:
The chalk hills, the spectral sky,
The black rose in flame,
Its odors and glittery hooks
Waiting for something to snag.
The mulberries wink like dimes;
Fat sheep, the mesquite and chaparral
Graze at their own sweet speed,
The earth white sugar;
Two miles below, and out,
The surf has nothing to add.
— Is this what awaits us, amorphous
Cobalt and zinc, a wide tide
Of brilliance we cannot define
Or use, and leafless, without guilt;
No guidelines or flutter, no
Cadence to pinpoint, no no?
Silence. As though the doorway behind
Us were liquid, were black water;
As though we might enter; as though
The ferry were there,
Ready to take us across,
— Remembering now, unwatermarked —
The blackout like scarves in our new hair.
The Fever Toy
The arms seem clumsy at first,
Outsize, the eyes detached; at odd angles,
The wrists respond to no touch;
Rickety, flat-veined, the legs
Push out like stems from their bulbous feet;
The fingers repeat themselves.
What pleasure this gives, this sure
Mating of parts, this slip and catch
Of bone to bone, of stiff flesh
To socket and joint, this gift
You give yourself in advance.
Instructions are not enclosed, and yet
How well you assemble it,
How well you insert yourself in each
Corner and crevice of its wrong arms:
Its breath caresses your eyes,
Its lips — like larvae — explore your face,
Its lashes become your own.
And this is how it begins.
This is the way your true name
Returns and returns again,
Your sorrow becoming a foreign tongue,
Your body becoming a foreign tongue,
Blue idiom, blue embrace.
Excerpted from "Country Music"
by .
Copyright © 1982 Charles Wright.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword: "Charles Wright's Country Music" by David St. John,
Preface,
The Grave of the Right Hand,
Aubade,
The Poet Grows Older,
The Voyage,
Nocturne,
Storm,
Hard Freight,
Homage to Ezra Pound,
Homage to Arthur Rimbaud,
Homage to Baron Corvo,
Homage to X,
The New Poem,
Portrait of the Poet in Abraham von Werdt's Dream,
Chinoiserie,
One Two Three,
White,
Firstborn,
Slides of Verona,
Grace,
Negatives,
The Fever Toy,
Notes for Oscar Wilde at San Miniato,
Oscar Wilde at San Miniato,
Nocturne,
Yellow,
Dog Creek Mainline,
Blackwater Mountain,
Sky Valley Rider,
Sex,
Northhanger Ridge,
Primogeniture,
Nightdream,
Congenital,
Clinchfield Station,
Bloodlines,
Virgo Descending,
Easter, 1974,
Cancer Rising,
Tattoos,
Notes to Tattoos,
Hardin County,
Delta Traveller,
Skins,
Notes to Skins,
Link Chain,
Bays Mountain Covenant,
Rural Route,
China Trace,
Childhood,
Snow,
Self-Portrait in 2035,
Morandi,
Dog,
Snapshot,
Indian Summer,
Wishes,
Quotidiana,
At Zero,
Sentences,
Death,
Next,
January,
1975,
Nerval's Mirror,
Edvard Munch,
Bygones,
Equation,
California Twilight,
Anniversary,
12 Lines at Midnight,
Dino Campana,
Invisible Landscape,
Remembering San Zeno,
Born Again,
Captain Dog,
Depression Before the Solstice,
Stone Canyon Nocturne,
Reply to Chi K'ang,
Reunion,
"Where Moth and Rust Doth Corrupt",
April,
Signature,
Noon,
Going Home,
Cloud River,
Reply to Lapo Gianni,
Thinking of Georg Trakl,
Spider Crystal Ascension,
Moving On,
Clear Night,
Autumn,
Sitting at Night on the Front Porch,
Saturday 6 a.m.,
Him,