"Sestets "is the nineteenth book from one of the country's most acclaimed poets, a masterpiece of formal rigor and a profound meditation on nature and mortality. It is yet another virtuosic showcase for Charles Wright's acclaimed descriptive powers, and also an inquiry into the nature of description itself, both seductive and dangerous: "a virtual world/ Unfit for the virtuous." Like his previous books, "Sestets "is seeded with the lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, and "there is always room to connect his highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives" ("Miami Herald"). Soaring and earthy, lyrical and direct, Charles Wright is an American treasure, and his search for a truth that transcends change and death settles finally on the beauties of nature and language: "Time is a graceless enemy, but purls as it comes and goes." Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. "Sestets "is the nineteenth book from one of the country's most acclaimed poets, a masterpiece of formal rigor and a profound meditation on nature and mortality. It is yet another virtuosic showcase for Charles Wright's acclaimed descriptive powers, and also an inquiry into the nature of description itself, both seductive and dangerous: "a virtual world/ Unfit for the virtuous." Like his previous books, "Sestets "is seeded with the lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, and "there is always room to connect his highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives" ("Miami Herald"). Soaring and earthy, lyrical and direct, Charles Wright is an American treasure, and his search for a truth that transcends change and death settles finally on the beauties of nature and language: "Time is a graceless enemy, but purls as it comes and goes." "This is the masterful language of a poet who can make us feel that what he says about the world is how it is . . . Sensually rich and gratifying."--Langdon Hammer, "Los Angeles Times Book Review"
"This is the masterful language of a poet who can make us feel that what he says about the world is how it is . . . Sensually rich and gratifying."--Langdon Hammer, "Los Angeles Times Book Review""" " Wright composes] lyrics of great beauty that achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, If this is not wisdom, I don'y know what is."--Charles Simic, "The New York Review of Books"" """ "There are precious few contemporary poets in whose work I find as much sheer wisdom as in Wright's . . . The whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, 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" " Wright's] work . . . does what the best poetry can do: whisk you to another world."--Amy Sparks, "The Plain Dealer" (Cleveland) "Charles Wright has been America's reigning southern mystic for almost four decades now. In books like "Country Music" and "Chickamauga," he turned the mythology of his native Tennessee and Virginia into a mirror cosmology of the heaven. History, he poems observe, is as immutable as distant galaxies. Bent-back, sober-eyes, his poems reach wisdom with wonder and curiosity, traveling along a poetic line that is so uniquely his own it comes with its own sound. With "Sestets," however, Wright has begun to address the most immutable thing of all--mortality. Not surprisingly, this is a dark and intimate book, to read these poems is to eavesdrop on a man meditating on life's final question . . . Time and again, the poems in "Sestets" perform this surprising pivot: pondering eternity, they cascade from a position of terror to a grace note . . . The form helps him along. A sestet is the second half of an Italian sonnet, the part where emotion takes a turn . . . There are more than five-dozen poems in "Sestets," a feast by many standards. But the poems have a delicacy which cannot be gorged upon. Reading this book straight through cheapens its tentative wisdom. It also reveals the rare few moments when Wright reaches for meaning rather than allows it occur through the evolution of a poem . . . Like Gary Snyder, Wright is at his best when he has become all but invisible within his own work. Even in poems that ponder the vanity of descriptive arts--I see it, therefore it exists--he displays an astonishing descriptive facility."--John Freeman, "Sun Sentinel
""Culture vultures may mob the Tom Waitses and Lil Waynes of our planet, but any poet of the page lives free of paparazzi. The Tennessee-born Wright deserves crowds. He's etched the bare rock face of American poetry with his glyphs for 19 books now, won a National Book Award (1983, for "Country Music") and a Pulitzer Prize (1998, for "Black Zodiac"). Still, as far as the popular reader goes, all this and a buck ninety buys a cup of Starbucks. "Sestets," Wright's newest, is a fresh-eyed experiments in six-line verse form, and it shows Wright's usual theme: He lives to describe. Here's how he put it in an earlier book, "Scar Tissue" (2006): 'I write out my charms and spells / against the passage of light / and gathering evil.' So Wright."--Charles McNair, "Paste "magazine
"Wright's new book, "Sestets," looks like a return to his earlier ideal of compactness. As he did in his youthful work, the poet strictly limits the length of his poems, in this case to six lines each. Yet these 70 poems feel spacious rather than condensed. Part of this effect comes from the fact that there the latest poems literally take up more space on the page, even though they are very short . . . Wright has learned to make expansiveness fit comfortably into little rooms, as neat a trick as you can find in poetry, old or new . . . There is a recurrent note of
