Sestets: Poems

by Charles Wright

Sestets is the nineteenth book from one of the country's most acclaimed poets, a masterpiece of formal rigor and a profound meditation on nature and mortality. It is yet another virtuosic showcase for Charles Wright's acclaimed descriptive powers, and also an inquiry into the nature of description itself, both seductive and "a virtual world/ Unfit for the virtuous." Like his previous books, Sestets is seeded with the lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, and "there is always room to connect his highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives" (Miami Herald). Soaring and earthy, lyrical and direct, Charles Wright is an American treasure, and his search for a truth that transcends change and death settles finally on the beauties of nature and "Time is a graceless enemy, but purls as it comes and goes."

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 31, 2009

About the author

Charles Wright is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac.

From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. Charles Wright is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. He attended Davidson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he also served four years in the U.S. Army, and it was while stationed in Italy that Wright began to read and write poetry. He is the author of over 20 books of poetry.

Charles Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed these poems, also because they were all of six lines, but mostly because Charles Wright wrote them. I don’t think this collection as a whole was as stunning as some of his other books, but it was still excellent. Very gracefully written. I dogeared many pages - things I loved and things I argued with.

I also enjoyed the titles, such as “As the Train Rolls Through, I Remember an Old Poem,” which begins -

Well, here we are again, old friend, Ancient of Days,
Eyeball to eyeball.

Other intriguing titles include:
“Our Days are Political, but Birds are Something Else”
“Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes”
“Twilight of the Dogs”

I don’t think Charles Wright pulls off the glib or light-hearted very well, such as when he begins a poems with “A-wop-bob-a-loo-lop a-lop-bam-boo.” I felt a resistance, too, to his using phrases like “haul ass” and “herky-jerky.” It just didn’t seem appropriate for a poet so grave and meditative to grab at chattiness.

I also felt some of the poems didn’t have the punch intended. For example, in the poem “When the Horses Gallop Away from Us, It’s a Good Thing,” I don’t get the feeling anything is being revealed to me. No, in fact it seems kind of banal, alas:

I always find it strange - though I shouldn’t - how creatures don’t
care for us the way we care for them.
Horses, for instance, and chipmunks, and any bird you’d name.
Empathy’s only a one-way street.

But when he’s on, he’s very on, as in the poem “Bitter Herbs to Eat, and Dipped in Honey,” which begins -

We lay out our own dark end, / guilt, and the happiness of guilt.

Here’s a link to some of the poems from Blackbird. They are all in the collection except for “Down in the Mines” (at least I do not find this title).
http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v6n2/poe...

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book was my introduction to Charles Wright. I'll almost certainly be reading more of his work. I understand his poetry can sometimes be journal-like with multiple themes. The compact gems of Sestets aren't at all like that. These 6-line poems have a Zen feel to them, but their modest look on the page is deceptive. The page's emptiness seems to emphasize vacancies while at the same time the words insist there's a balance between what is and what isn't so that a change here affects the fact of there. A vacancy creates a fullness somewhere else, like in the reader's mind, as if energy is being transformed, as if at the entrance to the mind thought can be both pecan-sized and horizon-sized. One poem is called a meditation. Reading that it occurred to me that's what these sestets are, meditations on nature, the nature of our place on earth and in the larger nature outside our world. They're as beautiful as haiku and they illuminate in the same way. This is a brilliant little book. Each of these gems has only 6 carefully fashioned facets, but their glint is lustrous.

[Therese L. Broderick · Rating 5 out of 5]

These 6-line poems are exquisite in phrasing and imagery, almost too beautiful to talk about. Each of these 69 sestets (notice the repetition and upside-down repetition of "6") is a marvel of poise: sound and silence; text and white space; the pain of longing and the peace of acceptance; the here and the not-here. And they are poised also between the sestet and the missing companion of the sonnet's sestet, the octave. That is, many of the 6 poetic lines are stepped-down into 8 or 9 typographical lines. A superb book by a superb poet.

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bought and read this today. The labor behind these poems is clearly expressed, and Wright's explanations for the universe are beautiful and accurate as always.

[James Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another marvelous collection of poems from Charles Wright. Read my review article, "Show Me the World," at Comment magazine.

[Eliana]

“… we, / Bewildered, who want our poems to be clouds / upholding the sour light of heaven,”

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

published in The Brooklyn Rail:
Charles Wright, Sestets
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009)

These are poems of dusk, not aubades or paeans to the noonday sun. They are adieus feeling their way past the “blank page of sundown sky.” At 70, Charles Wright is among our most august poets. His poetry comes “as close as we can come / To divinity, the language that circles the earth / and which we can never speak.”

Descriptions of his beloved Southland set the stage for sage, six-line meditations. Using verbal luminescence, Wright limns his companions: grass, clouds, tamarack, kingfishers, the graduating light moving from “gold to bronze to charcoal.” The author invites us to imagine eternity from the “cyclotron eyes” of a “Great blue on a dead limb.”

Wright’s voice, green glass, chimes with echoes of the Bible, Classicism, songs, and silence. His words put a “bell jar over our ills” so we can hear the “unknown music” of trees. A persistently keen search for “a footbridge or boat over Lethe” is sought throughout. Preparing for Charon to ferry him to the underworld, Wright places himself “With Horace, Sitting on the Platform, Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.”

In “Timetable,” a cosmic blend of tight and easy reaches a surreal plateau as “similes sift through my hands. / Bone-dusted coffins drift downriver.” And “Darkness, the great enveloper, envelops nothing.”

Addressing oblivion with sublimely lyric imagery, Wright democratically submits, “everyone’s name will be inscribed on the flyleaf in the Book of Snow.” Surely oblivion listens to words this good.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Future Tense

"All things in the end are bittersweet—
An empty gaze, a little way-station just beyond silence.

If you can’t delight in the everyday,
you have no future here.

And if you can, no future either.

And time, black dog, will sniff you out,
and lick your lean cheeks,
And lie down beside you—warm, real close—and will not move."

Whew.

[Patrick Mcgee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first Charles Wright collection I have read. All I have to say is "Wow!" As I understand it, this collections is a departure from his more standard (longer) poetry, but it definitely didn't lack power. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection and I think it would be a great place for any poetry fan to start if they want to check out Wright's work. Highly recommended.

[Jeca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some truly great lines in this collection. But the short poems may not allow Wright to find his stride the way he has in other volumes.

Some of the poems were quite funny and sly, which was a delight.

Hearing him read from the book on the New York Review of Books podcast shouldn't be missed, though.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

The old coot's still got it. First two-thirds of SESTETS seems stronger than the finish, as if Wright slips out of consciousness with nightfall on the mountainside.

[cc · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you don't shine you are darkness.
The future is merciless,
everyone's name inscribed
On the flyleaf of the Book of Snow.
-- "Tomorrow"

Description is expiation,
and not a place to hunker down in.
It is a virtual world
Unfit for the virtuous.
It is a coming to terms with.

Or coming to terms without.
As though whatever we had to say could keep it real.
As though our words were flies,
and the dead meat kept
reappearing.
-- "Description's the Art of Something or Other"

Half-moon rising, thin as a contact lens.
The sun going down
As effortlessly as a body through deep water,
Both at the same time, simple pleasures
As autumn begins to rustle and rinse,
as autumn begins to prink.

And now the clouds come on,
the same clouds that Turner saw.
Half of the moon sees them, half does not.
-- "Autumn Is Visionary, Summer's the Same Old Stuff"

Invisible, the black gondola floats
through down-lid and drowning stars.
-- "Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes"

The sun a garish hatpin
Incongruous in the netting and underfold of the day.
-- "Before the Propane Lamps Come on, the World Is a Risk and Wonder"

Unlike despair, happiness knows no final answer.
As one who has carried discontent
Like car keys,
why should I silence the music of their ping and jingle?

I turn to the Master of No Speech
And seek his counsel.
In the dye-glare of Zattere waters,
He opens his hands: five elements and the ten celestial stems.
-- "Only the I-Ching Hexagrams Are Lacking"

It's odd how the incandescent pine trees reenact
The Passion,
or the passion, say, after the Passion, because
We live in a post-Passionate world,
Still here,
but dead branches from the roots.
The green on top bewilders the late-evening sunlight.
Trees die from the top down;
we die from the bottom up.
-- "As a Pine Tree by the Waters"

Like rivers, my thoughts flow south,
for no particular reason.
Must be the full moon
That floods the sky, and makes the night wakeful
and full of remorse.

It's not here yet, but give it an hour or so, then we,
Bewildered, who want our poems to be clouds
upholding the sour light of heaven,
Will pass our gray hair through our fingers
and sigh just a little bit.
-- "Time Is a Child-Biting Dog"

[Kathleen E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally assigned to me in college as a prelude to an exercise (in which, you guessed it, we had to write six-line poems), I decided to revisit this largely to see if I should keep it on my shelves.

For the first third, I wondered why I had kept it. The first poem ("Tomorrow") was striking, but I was less impressed with the abstractions. Luckily, I was committed to reading the entire collection.

There are stunning lines like, "It is the hour of transmutation" or "The older I become, the more the landscape resembles me" both followed by beautiful, natural imagery. When the poems are grounded, nature-based, that's when these poems shine.

When they try to be more irreverent (all of "Tutti Frutti," a jarring poem on Little Richard, or "What's up, grand architect of the universe?"), it falls short. A lot of the abstraction happens early on, but the later poems have clear, quiet images of wildlife, forests, water. So, keeping this on the shelf to revisit again.

[Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

The more of Charles Wright I read the more I like his work. I get a sense from it as I read his poems - evidenced of many in Sestets - that they will be worth returning to. Like glimpsing a far off light, you know something is there, you get a flash of it, and then that light grows as your journey takes you closer to it. I look forward to walking through his other tomes and eventually back to Sestets to see how close I am to that flash of light.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admire poets who can pull off short poems, period. But
a whole book of them, like with Charles Wright's SESTETS?
Wow. In sixty-nine six-line poems, he demonstrates his
mastery of concision, meditating on nature and the meaning
of life while choosing his words with such care and playing
with structure as if to give form to the grace of his language.

(YES. I just wrote this review as a sestet! *fist pump*)

[ArtotheEm · Rating 4 out of 5]

File this one under "thinking about death while staring at nature," which is truly as close to universally relatable as you can get. My favorite poem was probably "When the Horses Gallop Away from Us, It's a Good Thing."

[Chapman Hood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sestets continues the spiritual journeys that Charles Wrights poetry embodies. Rich language coupled with an intense layering of insights opens the mind to connections that lead to new ways of seeing, hearing and sensing the world we temporarily inhabit.

[Daniel Silliman · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some lines that are gorgeous and profound. At least one poem here I deeply love.

[Dark Star · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved his nature poems. So few words can say so much.

[Keri Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite lines:

"I love to make the kingfishers fly"

"Sweet night, sweet steady, reliable, uncomplicated night"

"We live in a post-passionate world"

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sestets are so tricky. Favorite poem was “The Gospel According to Yours Truly.”

[Peter Rowe]

It’s good man

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sestet form forces Wright to keep to the essentials. He asks his usual existential questions, but doesn't dally. One wishes he had found this form sooner.

[selen · Rating 2 out of 5]

ehhh. maybe a 2.5??? the prose might be fine but it is so hard to parse any real meaning or takeaway because of the density of the same form over and over. same reason i really struggled with "frank: sonnets". i could appreciate all of these i am sure if they were presented in a different way.

[Douglas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wright is a professor at UVA. His poems are short and there is one on each page. Like many other poets he writes about nature in many poems. He also uses many Biblical and classical literature references.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's not to like about Charles Wright--nothing. Though the six line form gets old after awhile and emphasizes, perhaps, the limiting nature of having a voice that's gone unchanged for twenty-five years no matter how beautiful it is.

[Cone]

A master of economy. Love Charles Wright.....

[Heath Creel]

On first read, my favorite Charles Wright book