60 Poetry for Students
———, Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems,Random
House, 1982.
Vendler, Helen, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Po-
ets, Critics,Harvard University Press, 1988.
———, Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Po-
ets,Harvard University Press, 1980.
Wright, Charles, Appalachia,Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
1998.
———, Black Zodiac,Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997.
———, Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977–87,
University of Michigan Press, 1988.For Further Study
Stitt, Peter, Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary
Poets,University of Iowa Press, 1997.Stitt is a noted critic and editor of the Gettysburg Re-
view.In this book, he presents a very poignant study
of five contemporary American poets: John Ashbery,
Stephen Dobyns, Charles Simic, Gerald Stern, and
Charles Wright. He concentrates on the poets’ writ-
ing strategies, subject matter, cultural issues, and
artistic strengths and weaknesses.
Wright, Charles, Chickamauga,Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
1995.
This is the first book in the “triptych” which contains
Black Zodiac.In it, Wright sets the stage for the is-
sues he ponders in the subsequent two collections,
concluding that what he has learned in the 30 years
since he began writing is “not communicable.”
———, The Grave of the Right Hand,Wesleyan University
Press, 1970.
The is Wright’s first full-length collection of poetry,
and it demonstrates an early attention to the “archi-
tecture” of a book. The poems are shorter and more
precise than those in his later work, but there is still
an emphasis placed on overall structure and connec-
tions between the poems included.Black Zodiac