Country Music

Selected Early Poems

Charles Wright, David St. John

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780819512017
• eBook ISBN: 9780819572264
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Co-winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry, Country Music is comprised of eighty-eight poems selected from Charles Wright's first four books published between 1970 and 1977. From his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand passions: his desire to reclaim and redeem a personal past, to make a reckoning with his present, and to conjure the terms by which we might face the future," writes David St. John in the forward. These poems, powerful and moving in their own right, lend richness and insight to Wright's recently collected later works. "In Country Music we see the same explosive imagery, the same dismantled and concentric (or parallel) narratives, the same resolutely spiritual concerns that have become so familiar to us in Wright's more recent poetry," writes St. John.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: “Charles Wright’s Country Music” by David St. John
• Preface
• The Grave of the Right Hand
• Hard Freight
• Bloodlines
• China Trace
• About the Author