dumbfoundry

Buffalo Yoga
By Charles Wright

Wright has staked his claim to be considered a legitimate, and, in some ways, more genuinely American heir to Ezra Pound. Like Pound, Wright is in love with Italian culture. Wright has translated the poems of Eugenio Montale, and the painter Giorgio Morandi also is a presence in his work. Also like Pound, and with a kind of cultural omnivorousness that is both modernist and American, Wright has fused Western sources with a detailed knowledge of the culture and literature of China. And, like Pound, Wright is a lyric poet capable of writing poems with a narrative or even epic architecture.

Unlike Pound, Wright has not spent half his life in Europe. Instead, his work combines a geographical consciousness of North and South in the United States, and of East and West, in all the historical tensions this consciousness involves. The details he extracts from specific landscapes (those of Virginia or Montana or California) resonate with wisdom about the importance of any landscape in the definition of human consciousness.

This background is necessary in order to appreciate the cocky title of Wright's 16th book of poems - Buffalo Yoga, which so characteristically balances both West and the East. It contains all those verbal pleasures that readers of Wright have become accustomed to, voice and imagery at once colloquial and brilliant: "Sunblade for just a second, then back in its scabbard of clouds," or "Jesus, it's all still a fist of mist, / That keeps on cleaning my clock, / tick-tock, my youth, tick-tock, my youth... ."

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Sunday, November 07, 2004 at 10:46 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.