Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems

"Has any other American poet been writing as beautifully and daringly over the past twenty-five years as Charles Wright? Possibly. But I cannot imagine who it would be ... Wright has a hunk of the ineffable in his teeth and he won't let go. In poem after poem he plumbs our deepest relationships with nature, time, love, death, creation." --Phillip Levine, American Poet citation for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

"[Wright's] images, changing with the seasons, set the musical tone for each poem, and they are conceived in a manner that never ceases to astonish ... He sounds like nobody else, and he has remained faithful to insights and intuitions--of darkness as of light--less than common in contemporary America." --Helen Vendler, The New Republic

"There are precious few contemporary poets in whose work I find as much sheer wisdom as in Wright's ... His ascetic discipline is an instruction and an aesthetic. The whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditate, slow circle around Wright's grave influence." --David Baker, Poetry

"Inside [Wright's] lyric, there resides a world well beyond the ordinary ... It is the heart and soul that he delivers so eloquently." --Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times

"In an age of casual faithlessness, Wright successfully reconstitutes the provocative tension between belief and materialism." --Albert Mobilio, The Village Voice

"In a career that spans forty-five years and includes twenty-some books of poetry and every major poetry prize, from the Pultizer to the National Book Award, Wright has kept his thematic lens remarkably focused. A typical Wright poem begins with the speaker in his backyard, describing the landscape or the memory of a landscape; the resulting metaphor then ignites a philosophical meditation, often concerning theological matters . . . Wright is in a class almost alone for his ability to make fresh, wildly inventive metaphors from the stuff of the everyday, natural world . . . A lifetime spent searching out the divine the stuff of this world has yielded a body of work that will long outlive its creator." --Pablo Tanguay, Chapter 16