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Appalachia: Poems
Almost thirty years ago, Charles Wright (who teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry) began a poetic project of astonishing scope--a series of three trilogies. The first trilogy was collected in Country Music , the second in The World of the Ten Thousand Things , and the third began with Chickamauga and continued with Black Zodiac . Appalachia is the last book in the final trilogy of this pathbreaking and majestic series.
If Country Music traced "Wright's journey from the soil to the stars" and The World of the Ten Thousand Things "lovingly detailed" our world and made "a visionary map of the world beyond" (James Longenbach, The Nation ), this final book in Wright's great work reveals a master's confrontation with his own mortality and his stunning ability to discover transcendence in the most beautifully ordinary of landscapes.
If Country Music traced "Wright's journey from the soil to the stars" and The World of the Ten Thousand Things "lovingly detailed" our world and made "a visionary map of the world beyond" (James Longenbach, The Nation ), this final book in Wright's great work reveals a master's confrontation with his own mortality and his stunning ability to discover transcendence in the most beautifully ordinary of landscapes.
80 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1998
9 people are currently reading
289 people want to read
About the author
Charles Wright
238 books109 followersCharles 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.”
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.”
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
November 23, 2007
This is part three of the third part of a trilogy of poetry books by Mr. Wright, who I've not read before. For better or worse, I came into this with no idea of the scope of his work.
In general, I was quite pleased.
Writing primarily about an area I'm quite familiar with (though I'm by no means rural, I've grown up in and around the Appalachian Mountains, and visited them frequently, with an upcoming trip into them again on Monday), I was happy to see that Wright actually tries to use his skills to give us descriptions that both fit his mood and entertain with their construction.
Take this third paragraph from the first poem, "Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of the Rat":
"The dregs of the absolute are slow sift in my blood,
Dead branches down after high winds, dead yard grass and
undergrowth--
The sure accumulation of all that's not revealed
Rises like snow in my bare places,
cross-whipped and openmouthed."
I really like how, in poem after poem, Wright uses the things we can see on any given day in the eastern mountains with the mood he's feeling. I had a hard time selecting just the right poem to represent it, but I think "Indian Summer II" does a nice job for me:
"As leaves fall from the trees, the body falls from the soul.
As memory signs transcendence, scales fall from the heart.
As sunlight winds back on its dark spool,
November's a burn and an ache.
A turkey buzzard logs on to the late evening sky.
Residual blood in the oak's veins.
Sunday. recycleing tubs like flower bins at the curb.
...
We live in two landscapes, as Augustine might have said,
One that's eternal and divine,
and one that's just the back yard,
Dead leaves and dead grass in November, purple in spring."
Almost all the poems are in this reflective style--Wright is a man thinking about how he views life, using the Appalachian world around him as his prism. Even those poems not directly using the scenery, such as "In the Kingdom of the Past, the Brown-Eyed Man is King" share this reflective attitude.
One of the interesting things Wright does is to re-use titles across the collection, mostly notably the "Appalachian Book of the Dead" series, where Wright mixes mythology with the scenes of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. I think those might be my favorites.
All of these poems are previously published, which I'm learning is fairly common in poetry collections, so those who read more literary journals than me may have seen some of these before. Either way, this is a good collection and I definitely want to read more of Wright's work. Perhaps I'll start at the beginning of his opus next time. (Library, 11/07)
Trebby's Take: An excellent collection with good use of imagery. Recommended!
In general, I was quite pleased.
Writing primarily about an area I'm quite familiar with (though I'm by no means rural, I've grown up in and around the Appalachian Mountains, and visited them frequently, with an upcoming trip into them again on Monday), I was happy to see that Wright actually tries to use his skills to give us descriptions that both fit his mood and entertain with their construction.
Take this third paragraph from the first poem, "Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of the Rat":
"The dregs of the absolute are slow sift in my blood,
Dead branches down after high winds, dead yard grass and
undergrowth--
The sure accumulation of all that's not revealed
Rises like snow in my bare places,
cross-whipped and openmouthed."
I really like how, in poem after poem, Wright uses the things we can see on any given day in the eastern mountains with the mood he's feeling. I had a hard time selecting just the right poem to represent it, but I think "Indian Summer II" does a nice job for me:
"As leaves fall from the trees, the body falls from the soul.
As memory signs transcendence, scales fall from the heart.
As sunlight winds back on its dark spool,
November's a burn and an ache.
A turkey buzzard logs on to the late evening sky.
Residual blood in the oak's veins.
Sunday. recycleing tubs like flower bins at the curb.
...
We live in two landscapes, as Augustine might have said,
One that's eternal and divine,
and one that's just the back yard,
Dead leaves and dead grass in November, purple in spring."
Almost all the poems are in this reflective style--Wright is a man thinking about how he views life, using the Appalachian world around him as his prism. Even those poems not directly using the scenery, such as "In the Kingdom of the Past, the Brown-Eyed Man is King" share this reflective attitude.
One of the interesting things Wright does is to re-use titles across the collection, mostly notably the "Appalachian Book of the Dead" series, where Wright mixes mythology with the scenes of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. I think those might be my favorites.
All of these poems are previously published, which I'm learning is fairly common in poetry collections, so those who read more literary journals than me may have seen some of these before. Either way, this is a good collection and I definitely want to read more of Wright's work. Perhaps I'll start at the beginning of his opus next time. (Library, 11/07)
Trebby's Take: An excellent collection with good use of imagery. Recommended!
January 2, 2015
Our current Poet Laureate is at his best doing poems of rural America. This book roams from updated meditations on the Book of the Dead to fireworks on the 4th of July. Part of a trilogy.
September 4, 2024
This is our landscape,
Bourgeois, heartbreakingly suburban;
these are the ashes we rise from.
As night goes down, we watch it darken and disappear.
We push our glasses back on our foreheads,
look hard, and it disappears.
In another life, the sun shines and the clouds are motionless.
There, too, the would-be-saints are slipping their hair shirts on.
But only the light souls can be saved;
Only the ones whose weight
will not snap the angel's wings.
Too many things are not left unsaid.
If you want what the syllables want, just do your job.
-- "A Bad Memory Makes You a Metaphysician, a Good One Makes You a Saint"
Our lives are like birds' lives, flying around, blown away.
We're bandied and bucked on and carried across the sky,
Drowned in the blue of the infinite,
blur-white and drift.
We disappear as stars do, soundless, without a trace.
-- "Drone and Ostinato"
I try to look at landscape as though I weren't there,
but know, where I am,
I disturb that place by breathing, by my heart's beating --
I only remember things t hat I think I've forgot,
Lives the color of dead leaves, for instance, days like dead insects.
-- "Back Yard Boogie Woogie"
All my life I've looked for this slow light, this smallish light
Starting to seep, coppery blue,
out of the upper right-hand corner of things,
Down through the trees and off the back yard,
Rising and falling at the same time, now rising, now falling,
Inside the lapis lazuli of late afternoon.
Until the clouds stop, and hush.
Until the left hedge and the right hedge,
the insects and short dogs,
The back porch and barn swallows grain-out and disappear.
Until the bypass is blown with silence, until the grass grieves.
Until there is nothing else.
-- "Opus Posthumous III"
Bourgeois, heartbreakingly suburban;
these are the ashes we rise from.
As night goes down, we watch it darken and disappear.
We push our glasses back on our foreheads,
look hard, and it disappears.
In another life, the sun shines and the clouds are motionless.
There, too, the would-be-saints are slipping their hair shirts on.
But only the light souls can be saved;
Only the ones whose weight
will not snap the angel's wings.
Too many things are not left unsaid.
If you want what the syllables want, just do your job.
-- "A Bad Memory Makes You a Metaphysician, a Good One Makes You a Saint"
The world was born when the devil yawned,
the legend goes,
And who's to say it's not true,
Color of flesh, some inner and hidden bloom of flesh.
Rain back again, then back off,
Sunlight suffused like a chest pain across the tree limbs.
God, the gathering night, assumes it.
We haven't a clue as to what counts
In the secret landscape behind the landscape we look at here.
We just don't know what matters,
May dull and death-distanced,
Sky half-lit and grackle-ganged --
It's all the same dark, it's all the same absence of dark.
Part of the rain has now fallen, the rest still to fall.
-- "Thinking About the Poet Larry Levis One Afternoon in Late May"
Our lives are like birds' lives, flying around, blown away.
We're bandied and bucked on and carried across the sky,
Drowned in the blue of the infinite,
blur-white and drift.
We disappear as stars do, soundless, without a trace.
-- "Drone and Ostinato"
What God is the God behind the God who moves the chess pieces,
Borges wondered.
What mask is the mask behind the mask
The language wears and the landscape wears, I ask myself.
O, well, I let the south wind blow all over my face.
I let the sunshine release me and fall over my face.
I try not to think of them stopping.
-- "'It's Turtles All the Way Down'"
I try to look at landscape as though I weren't there,
but know, where I am,
I disturb that place by breathing, by my heart's beating --
I only remember things t hat I think I've forgot,
Lives the color of dead leaves, for instance, days like dead insects.
-- "Back Yard Boogie Woogie"
Religion's been in a ruin for over a thousand years.
Why shouldn't the sky be tatters,
lost notes to forgotten songs?
I inhabit who I am, as T'ao Ch'ing says, and walk about
Under the mindless clouds.
When it ends, it ends. What else?
One morning I'll leave home and never find my way back --
My story and I will disappear together, justl ike this.
-- "After Reading T'ao Ch'ing, I Wander Untethered Through the Short Grass"
All my life I've looked for this slow light, this smallish light
Starting to seep, coppery blue,
out of the upper right-hand corner of things,
Down through the trees and off the back yard,
Rising and falling at the same time, now rising, now falling,
Inside the lapis lazuli of late afternoon.
Until the clouds stop, and hush.
Until the left hedge and the right hedge,
the insects and short dogs,
The back porch and barn swallows grain-out and disappear.
Until the bypass is blown with silence, until the grass grieves.
Until there is nothing else.
-- "Opus Posthumous III"
September 13, 2023
amazing, new favorite poet
October 28, 2009
"The Appalachian Book of the Dead" series was a diamond in the coal of this book (coal meaning deep, rich, powerful, good stuff). I love how the poems go gradually and gently through the seasons, sweeping you along like a lazy, meandering creek with no where really to go. To me, the desire to savor and enjoy the words as they arrive on the page is the mark of a truly great collection of poems.
November 2, 2014
Charles Wright is a spiritual poet who questions everything including his questions. He is a poet of nature who suspects that nature has a trick up her sleeve. Landscape and language interplay and he asks much of both, received much, but never enough.
In this collection, he reads from an imagined "Appalachian Book of the Dead" and takes us deep into wonder, and fear, and hope, and resignation, "Until there is nothing else" but silence.
In this collection, he reads from an imagined "Appalachian Book of the Dead" and takes us deep into wonder, and fear, and hope, and resignation, "Until there is nothing else" but silence.
January 28, 2016
I was not overly impressed with this book. The Appalachian region is a beautiful background for poetry and literature, and I feel like Charles squandered this opportunity. Instead of invoking graceful and complex imagery with his words, his poems were obscure and unnecessarily complicated. There were a few good poems, but over all, his work was uninspiring.
August 22, 2007
There's nothing I can say about Charles wright except that I love his poetry, and so does my 2-month old son! (it's a little cerebral for him but he's enjoying the 'readings' we do) :)
my favorite contemporary poet, imagery to break your heart.
my favorite contemporary poet, imagery to break your heart.
August 5, 2012
The third book in the third trilogy of a trilogy of trilogies if my understanding is correct. What's great about Wright is you can dip in whenever and learn something, feel something new. This collection has his poem for Larry Levis, an outstanding poem. Good stuff.
January 12, 2013
A startling, succinct collection of verse which offers us a momentary glimpse at a myriad collection of frozen vignettes exposed in the illuminating glow of well written prose.
May 12, 2013
Another great collection from Charles Wright. I don't know what else to say about his poetry since I have gushed about it so much over the last several weeks. Go check it out. Highly recommended!
December 31, 2025
** 4.5 stars **
Loved this collection of Wright's from the late '90s. He focuses here on the limitations of language as juxtaposed with the cyclical and enduring nature of earth/the natural landscape. Here is a poem from the volume that I liked a lot and feel is fairly representative of the poems in this collection (if you like it, then I would recommend Appalachia to you):
"When You're Lost in Juarez, in the Rain, and It's Eastertime Too"
Like a grain of sand added to time,
Like an inch of air added to space,
or a half-inch,
We scribble our little sentences.
Some of them sound okay and some of them sound not so okay.
A grain and an inch, a grain and an inch and a half.
Sad word wands, desperate alphabet.
Still, there's been no alternative
Since language fell from the sky.
Though mystics have always said that communication is
languageless.
And maybe they're right--
the soul speaks and the soul receives.
Small room for rebuttal there ...
Over the Blue Ridge, late March late light annunciatory and
visitational.
Tonight, the comet Hale-Bopp
will ghost up on the dark page of the sky
By its secret juice and design from the moon's full heat.
Tonight, some miracle will happen somewhere, it always does.
Good Friday's a hard rain that won't fall,
Wild onion and clump grass, green on green.
Our mouths are incapable, white violets cover the earth.
Loved this collection of Wright's from the late '90s. He focuses here on the limitations of language as juxtaposed with the cyclical and enduring nature of earth/the natural landscape. Here is a poem from the volume that I liked a lot and feel is fairly representative of the poems in this collection (if you like it, then I would recommend Appalachia to you):
"When You're Lost in Juarez, in the Rain, and It's Eastertime Too"
Like a grain of sand added to time,
Like an inch of air added to space,
or a half-inch,
We scribble our little sentences.
Some of them sound okay and some of them sound not so okay.
A grain and an inch, a grain and an inch and a half.
Sad word wands, desperate alphabet.
Still, there's been no alternative
Since language fell from the sky.
Though mystics have always said that communication is
languageless.
And maybe they're right--
the soul speaks and the soul receives.
Small room for rebuttal there ...
Over the Blue Ridge, late March late light annunciatory and
visitational.
Tonight, the comet Hale-Bopp
will ghost up on the dark page of the sky
By its secret juice and design from the moon's full heat.
Tonight, some miracle will happen somewhere, it always does.
Good Friday's a hard rain that won't fall,
Wild onion and clump grass, green on green.
Our mouths are incapable, white violets cover the earth.
July 24, 2023
Wright's precise and evocative language weaves a landscape that is vivid, rich, and filled with the kind of detail that transforms a simple description into a sensory experience. His writing style is fascinating; blank verses are embroidered comfortably and seamlessly with a contemporary sense of imagery and language. Yet, the poems in "Appalachia" demand an attentive reading. They are steeped in nuanced symbolism, introspective commentary, and profound insights, which may not be instantly accessible. Whatever challenge these poems present is worth the effort; they reward the patient reader with a depth of understanding hardly found elsewhere or through any other means.
May 21, 2017
Great titles for poems: original and amazing!
Example: "After rereading Robert Graves, I go outside to get my head together"
Beautiful excerpt: p. 64, from the poem, "Opus Posthumous III":
"All my life I've looked for this slow light, this smallish light
starting to seep, coppery blue,
out of the upper right-hand corner of things,
down through the trees and off the back yard,
Rising and falling at the same time, now rising, now falling,
inside the lapis lazuli of late afternoon."
Example: "After rereading Robert Graves, I go outside to get my head together"
Beautiful excerpt: p. 64, from the poem, "Opus Posthumous III":
"All my life I've looked for this slow light, this smallish light
starting to seep, coppery blue,
out of the upper right-hand corner of things,
down through the trees and off the back yard,
Rising and falling at the same time, now rising, now falling,
inside the lapis lazuli of late afternoon."
July 16, 2021
My professor of poetry in college recommended this book to me a couple of years ago. It’s by Charles Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize for a previous volume of poetry in 1998. I must admit that Wright’s poetry is not for the beginner or the feint-hearted. His poetry makes you work for it. Yet, the payoff is enormously rewarding. I will revisit this book many more times to draw from its wisdom. Recommend.
April 5, 2019
i haven't read the other works leading up to this one but i absolutely should. beautifully done with a lot of moments i want to come back to again and again. read it in one sitting and have picked it up again four times since. expertly places the reader in specific moments and places and made me v nostalgic
October 22, 2020
big caveat that this is 9th book in a trilogy of trilogies? which I didn't know when I picked it up at used book store 5 years ago. I come back to it every couple of years, wondering if I'll read it different. definitely old man nature porch spiritual musing vibes. Some of which I like enough to go back to other books now eventually but wouldn't recommend picking up here.
August 18, 2020
Yes, Pulitzer Prize committee, you made the right decision when voting yes on this exquisite collection that begs a reread directly after your first read. Short poems with big voice. Deep-imagery. Symbolic, sensitive, spiritual. Is one motif language itself? Lovely.
December 19, 2017
Unmemorable.
June 16, 2019
4.5 stars. There is so much to appreciate here. Wright would easily be my favorite poet if he weren't so given over to despair.
January 24, 2020
Give me the name of things, just give me their real names,
not what we call them, but what
They call themselves when no one’s listening—
not what we call them, but what
They call themselves when no one’s listening—
November 6, 2022
This book changed my life when I was 13 years old. Specifically, "Star Turn". I'd had no idea language could do that until this book. I'm indebted to it.
October 4, 2021
Grew up near the Appalachians, even hiked them, and this collection doesn't do justice to their beauty.
November 27, 2012
I don't read a lot of poetry, and this set didn't especially appeal to me. I thought the focus would be more place-based and in Appalachia, but then again, I don't know anything about Charles Wright. The poems grew stronger as I progressed through the book, and there were a few gems, but overall I wasn't particularly affected.
January 4, 2009
The best of Charles Wright in my HO.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews