A Short History of the Shadow: Poems

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.