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by James Wright (Author), Suzanna Tamminen (Editor), Oliver Egger (Editor)
This volume gathers James Wright's most resonant poems of horses, ponies, and the fields that hold them, offering a focused entrance into one of the defining American lyric voices of the postwar period. Wright (1927-1980) writes from the Ohio River valley and the industrial Midwest with a diction that stays plain while the images turn incandescent. Across these poems, horses become more than pastoral scenery. They register human fatigue, brief deliverance, bodily grace, and the ache of leaving. Wright's "deep image" practice favors the decisive moment: a fence line at dusk, a muzzle in the hand, a sudden stillness in the mind when an animal meets the gaze without demand. The collection highlights how Wright's attention to animals clarifies his larger commitments: care for the marginalized, tenderness toward damaged places, and a hard-won openness to joy. Readers who come for the famous encounter of "A Blessing" will find its aftershocks throughout: the poems return to touch, breath, and a kind of recognition that exceeds explanation. The book arranges the work to emphasize Wright's evolving line, from earlier formal control into the looser, luminous free verse that helped earn him the Pulitzer Prize for Collected Poems (1971). For longtime admirers and new readers alike, this is Wright distilled through the animal that best carries his imagination.
Author Biography
James Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, in 1927. He was well known for his translations of such Spanish poets as Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo and for his poems about the Midwest. He received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1972 for his Collected Poems. Other books of his published by Wesleyan are Saint Judas, Shall We Gather at the River, and Above the River: The Complete Poems (co published with Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His first book, The Green Wall was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize. James Wright died on March 26, 1980, at the age of 52.
