Black Zodiac

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
"Black Zodiac" offers poems suffused with spiritual longing--lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."
Charles Wright was awarded the National Book Award in Poetry in 1983 for "Country Music" and the 1995 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for "Chickamauga." In 2008, he was honored for his lifetime achievement with the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
"Black Zodiac" offers poems suffused with spiritual longing--lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."
""Black Zodiac" concentrates on Charles Wright's considerable poetic endowment into a new poignance that has to be termed religious. Some of the poems achieve an authentic gnosis in a rapt mode of negative transcendence."--Harold Bloom
""Black Zodiac" occupies the position in Wright's career that "The Auroras of Autumn" holds in Wallace Stevens's: Having long since mastered his characteristic voice, the poet has passed through the terrifying moment when mastery threatens to become mannerism, and he has emerged as a poet whose every line seems completely recognizable and at the same time utterly fresh."--James Longenbach, "The Nation"
"Combines an impeccable musical and prosaic sense with the kind of humility possessed by the masters."--Carol Muske, "The New York Times Book Review"