Box

by Robert Wrigley

A powerful new collection from an acclaimed, award-winning poet

With nine previously published collections of poetry, Robert Wrigley has become one of his generation's most accomplished poets, renowned for his irony, power, and lucid style and for his ability to fuse narrative and lyrical impulses.

Wrigley's tenth collection,  Box , is a book of poems obsessed with human containment, with the way people are contained or confined—by time, mortality, technology, identity, culture, and history—in almost everything they are and everything they do. Even the body, even the poem itself, is in this regard a kind of self-containing crate, in which the human being, perhaps the human spirit, is shipped into the world at large. But  Box  is also a book obsessed with escape from containment, and escape comes from dreams, from deep awareness, from contemplation, from love, and above all, as Wallace Stevens insisted, from "the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality." The poems in  Box  aim to do nothing less than "help people live their lives," as Stevens put it.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published March 28, 2017

About the author

Robert Wrigley is the author of seven books of poetry, including, most recently, Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003), winner of the 2005 Poets Prize; and Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999), winner of the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Award in Poetry. His book, In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995) won the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award, and his poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review. His poems have been reprinted twice in the Best American Poetry anthologies, and five times in the Pushcart Prize collections. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts, Wrigley is Professor of English and teaches in the MFA Program in Writing at the University of Idaho. He lives in the woods near Moscow, Idaho, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes. "

Reviews

[Becky Loader]

I am new to Wrigley's work, and I look forward to reading more of it.

[Amy]

Masculine nature poems. Wrigley has a particularly nice sense of language in formal and lyric poetry.

They would not know what to make of this work
I do, which would not seem to them like work at all.

And

He has never dreamed of being a lake
in the high mountains, and now he wonders why.
Surely there could be no better, in the way
of dreamy aspirations:

[Charlie]

sum very gud nature poetree

[Bryan]

Often mundane topics brought to glittering life by striking and original imagery.

[c]

A bunch of poems about birds. The author description in back tells you Wrigley "lives in the woods"

[dirt]

Peep these lines from just the first poem in this collection:

An outhouse forgave all sins without confession.

Elsewhere was another myth they did not believe.

Socialists and anarchists, mostly, they disapproved of Democrats but despised Republicans.

That should wet your whistle.

Prepare yourself before the Conservator's Statement because you will feel overwhelmed by shelves full of flotsam, knick knacks, and mementos.