Reviews

• Poetry, they say, can be partly defined as an utterance incapable of being paraphrased. That is true of all Charles Wright's work, insofar as I'm familiar with it, but especially so of Scar Tissue. This is a work that exists in the inbetween. It is full of things felt, not known; things intuited, not reasoned; of "the endless sky with its endless cargo of cloud parts" (Scar Tissue); and of whole days where "the wind will comb out it's hair through the teeth of the evergreens." and "the sunlight will sun itself/ On the back porch of the cottage, out of the weather." (Scar Tissue II) It is beautiful, quietly and very familiarly ruminative: just you and an old friend sipping some single batch bourbon (Wright is, after all, from down that way) talking with an easy speculative walking pace kind of riff about memories, places you've been, things you've seen, the geography you belong to. I can not begin to tell you how much I love these poems. Appearances by: Li Po, Hildegard of Bingen, Basho, Heraclitus and the Appalachia Dog....a metallic red '49 Ford, chopped and channeled, a "major ride" seen once "dragging the gut" in Kingsport and remembered ever after with it's "taillights like nobody's eyes/ Low-riding west toward the rising sun." (Appalachia Dog) To my view, there are no duds or weak spots. There's lots to think about and lots to just plain enjoy and, frankly, it doesn't make your head hurt. But it is the expression of the felt intangible that distinguishes these poems for me or as Wright himself puts it: "The absence the two/ horses have left on the bare slope,/ The silence that grazes like two shapes where they have been." and then "Flecked in the underlap, however,/ half-glimpsed, half-recognized,/ Something unordinary persists,/ Something unstill, never-sleeping, just possible past reason./ Then unflecked by evening's overflow/ and its counter current." (Against the American Grain) In this day and age, for poems this highly decorated from a poet with Wright's critical renown to be this readable and widely accessable is a minor miracle. Great great work. Pick it up; join this extraordinary fellow, Mr. Charles Wright, in his explorations in the underlap..... Highly recommended.

• I felt like there was nothing else in the world but Four Quartets by TS Eliot. Sometimes this really got me down. Nothing I could find went that deep: mysterious and at the same time comforting, scary and reassuring - So I can't tell you how glad I was to find Wright. It wasn't easy - if you told me to read a poet from Appalachia writing about the suburbs - I may not have put Wright on the top of my list. Now he's on my bed table - which kind of represents the top of the list.

• Charles Wright is probably one of the best poets around today. His images are strong, his language direct, his allusions trackable. He's also one of the few poets I've read over a period of 15 years or more, so it's with great anticipation that I look forward to his new work. Some of these poems appeared in a chapbook THE WRONG SIDE OF THE RAINBOW, so I felt lucky to have had a headstart on SCAR TISSUE. It's a good read, a good reread, and good for study.

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