Luminous new poems from one who has long been a poet of gorgeous description --William Logan, * The New Criterion*

Luminous new poems from one who has long been a poet of gorgeous description --William Logan, * The New Criterion*

• Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.*

• Don't just do something, sit there.*

• And so I have, so I have,*

• the seasons curling around me like smoke,*

• Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound.*--from Body and Soul II This is Charles Wright's first collection of verse since the gathering, in Negative Blue, of his Appalachian Book of the Dead, a trilogy of trilogies hailed among the great long poems of the century (James Longenbach, Boston Review). In A Short History of the Shadow, Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.