Transfigurations: Collected Poems

by Jay Wright

Few poets have as much to tell us about the intricate relationship between the African American past and present as Jay Wright. His poems weave a rich fabric of personal history using diverse materials drawn from African, Native American, and European sources. Scholarly, historical, intuitive, and emotional, his work explores territories in which rituals of psychological and spiritual individuation find a new synthesis in the construction of cultural values. Never an ideologue but always a poet of vision, his imagination shows us a way to rejoice and strengthen ourselves in our common humanity.

Here, together for the first time, are Wright’s previously published collections― The Homecoming Singer (1971), Soothsayers and Omens (1976), Explications/Interpretations (1984), Dimensions of History (1976), The Double Invention of Komo (1980), Elaine’s Book (1988), and Boleros (1991)―along with the new poems of Transformations (1997). By presenting Wright’s work as a whole, this collection reveals the powerful consistency of his theme―a spiritual or intellectual quest for personal development―as each book builds solidly upon the previous one.

Wright examines history from a multicultural perspective, attempting to conquer a sense of exclusion―from society and his own cultural identity―and find solace and accord by linking American society to African traditions. He believes that a poem must articulate the vital rhythms of the culture it depicts and is dedicated to a pursuit of poetic forms that embody the cadence of African American culture.

Defying characterization, Wright has experimented with voices, languages, cultures, and forms not normally associated with African American literature. He is well schooled in the cultures of West Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and―true to his New Mexican birth―he is a powerful synthesizer of human experience.

Transfigurations reveals Wright to be a man of profound knowledge and a poet of exalted verbal intensity.

Genres: Poetry

640 pages, Paperback

First published October 5, 2000

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Come every half century, the world is graced with the intelligence/spirit of genius. A friend of mine gave me 'Transfigurations' and after the first three poems, I put it down. He said try it again. I tried. After the same three poems plus one I put it down. He said this time, complete the whole thing and he would fly me to NY to see the writer speak BECUASE when finished, all I'd want to do is hear his voice live. Sure enough, one evening after a long stretch of not reading, I completed the book in six hours. It was a tiresome, (emotionally and cognitively) experience. Alas, my friend was right and as happens with extraordinary art, I was changed. We flew to NY. He was reading at a small venue in a Brooklyn bookstore (four people in attendance: my friend and I and two students of Wright's from long ago). It was one of the most magical evenings of my life. It was also one of the saddest.

Wright read in a wheelchair with a cigarette in hand and the habit of forgetting what he was reading and why. At one point he said, "Why am I reading this?" My friend said, "Because until recently this girl hadn't read you. Now she has. And all she wants to do is hear your voice." Wright said, "That's all a poet can ask for."

[Adrian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harold Bloom: "An interviewer the other day asked me who was the best living American poet. Since John Ashbery and his generation have departed, without hesitation I replied: Jay Wright. The interviewer had heard nothing of him.
...
Jay Wright is a difficult poet, like Geoffrey Hill or Hart Crane or William Blake. Those are four different kinds of difficulty. Blake tells a story of his own with invented personages, who are both human and more than human. Hart Crane pitches his tone so high that the reader can be left behind, unable to keep up with the leap of a “logic of metaphor” storming the heights of the Unapparent. Geoffrey Hill is either gnomic or garrulous, and moves capriciously from formal construction to the rapping of his boundless gnostic harangue. Jay Wright has a nobly lucid style, but it is dense with allusion, and quite deliberately brings together African mythology (mostly Dogon), the Spanish poetry of the Americas, Dante, U.S. poetic tradition from Emerson and Whitman to T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane.
...
Robert B. Shaw, called the author of The Double Invention of Komo and Dimensions of History “a belated High Modernist,” and lamented that readers uneducated in the relevant anthropological sources would require commentaries before they could judge the question of value in Wright’s work. Yet, like T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane, Jay Wright at his most appealing is an incantatory writer whose initial impact transcends the necessity of commentary. Pindar is an immensely difficult poet, dense with mythological allusiveness, but his passionate pride in his own agonistic poetic prowess eloquently goes beyond his intricate ecstasies of mythic counterpoint. The high song more than sustains its difficulties, and Pindar always asks and answers the triple-question of the Sublime: more than? less than? or equal to? Excellence in the range and reach of the spirit is always the burden of the Sublime—in Pindar, Hölderlin, Shelley, Hart Crane, and very much in the major phase of Jay Wright."

Dante Micheaux: "Wright is a difficult poet but, paraphrasing Harold Bloom, there are difficult pleasures to be had from his high song. Moreover, he would be less difficult if the teaching of history were more accurate and reflected Wright’s range."

[Anastasios Kozaitis · Rating 5 out of 5]

the bible

[Christopher Walthorne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of Jay Wright’s poetry is a mixed bag. The best volumes are Dimensions of History (1976) and Transformations (1997), the two most focused and ambitious in scope; the worst is Elaine’s Book (1988), a muddled and clumsy attempt to grapple with too many themes at once. Wright is at his best when he sticks to a theme and runs with it, but one thing that seems to be common with him is that he keeps getting distracted by other ideas and attempts to cram them in unnecessarily. Ultimately, I suppose there is a reason why most people haven’t heard of Jay Wright; he is, at best, a fairly average poet who gets lost in his own intellectualism and spirituality, two factors that may entice more pretentious or academic readers, but which leave the rest of us longing for something with more heart and genuine feeling.