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Selected Poems
The first selected poems of a major poet who "wrote with more heart than any other North American poet of the twentieth century" (Rodney Jones, Parnassus )
More than any other poet of his generation, James Wright spoke to the great sadness and hope that are inextricable from the iconography of its rail yards, rivers, cities, and once vast natural beauty. Speaking in the unique lyrical voice that he called his "Ohioan," Wright created poems of immense sympathy for sociey's alienated and outcast figures and also of ardent wonder at the restorative power of nature.
Selected Poems fills a significant gap in Wright's that of an accessible, carefully chosen collection to satisfy both longtime readers and those just discovering his work. Edited and with an introduction by Wright's widow, Anne, and his close friend the poet Robert Bly, who also wrote an introduction, Selected Poems is a personal, deeply considered collection of work with pieces chosen from all of Wright's books. It is an overdue--and timely--new view of a poet whose life and work encompassed the extremes of American life.
More than any other poet of his generation, James Wright spoke to the great sadness and hope that are inextricable from the iconography of its rail yards, rivers, cities, and once vast natural beauty. Speaking in the unique lyrical voice that he called his "Ohioan," Wright created poems of immense sympathy for sociey's alienated and outcast figures and also of ardent wonder at the restorative power of nature.
Selected Poems fills a significant gap in Wright's that of an accessible, carefully chosen collection to satisfy both longtime readers and those just discovering his work. Edited and with an introduction by Wright's widow, Anne, and his close friend the poet Robert Bly, who also wrote an introduction, Selected Poems is a personal, deeply considered collection of work with pieces chosen from all of Wright's books. It is an overdue--and timely--new view of a poet whose life and work encompassed the extremes of American life.
- GenresPoetryUnfinished
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
5 people are currently reading
105 people want to read
About the author
James Wright
506 books104 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
On December 13, 1927, James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. While in high school in 1943 Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation. He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and studied under John Crowe Ransom. He graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1952, then married another Martins Ferry native, Liberty Kardules. The two traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, Wright studied the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of Vienna. He returned to the U.S. and earned master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. He went on to teach at The University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and New York City's Hunter College.
On December 13, 1927, James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. While in high school in 1943 Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation. He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and studied under John Crowe Ransom. He graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1952, then married another Martins Ferry native, Liberty Kardules. The two traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, Wright studied the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of Vienna. He returned to the U.S. and earned master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. He went on to teach at The University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and New York City's Hunter College.
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May 9, 2024
I have an interesting relationship with this book, and this poet.
For years, "Selected Poems" was used to support the printer in my home office, in the first house my wife and I bought in Tulsa. No particular "rhyme" (LOL) or reason, other than the book was available when I needed something to help prop up the printer.
Fast forward a few years, and I was able to "recover" this remarkable volume, and recently finished (finally) reading it. In my life Wellness program, I am taught to "not regret the past, nor seek to shut the door on it". So, I am actually glad I didn't read "Selected Poems" until now.
Why?
It requires a careful, luxuriant reading. Wright was a major figure in late 20th Century American Poetry, who may (or may not) have committed suicide at the house of a friend. Regardless, he is, sadly, gone from this world and the world is poorer for the loss. The "Selected" was posthumously collected and curated by his widow, and also the poet Robert Bly.
For someone coming to Wright for the first time, the "Selected" is an excellent way in, as it features poems from, I believe, all of his published works.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Wright's poetry reminds me of the other great American poet with that last name, Charles Wright (unrelated). James Wright surveys an America that is both beautiful and terrible, coming as he seems to be doing out of the horror of, in his earlier works, The Vietnam War. But the War isn't really a character in these poems, just something that seems to hover over, or inform the language and subject matter.
Two main geographies dominate the "Selected" - Wright's home state of Ohio (where, as the song says, "four dead") and Italy. To some extent, these two locations form poles between which Wright's poetic project seems to oscillate. Part of this is Wright, in Ohio and adjacent states, remembering his childhood and his Father (not flatteringly) and part of this is an older Wright, reflecting on Italy as both a country that is perhaps no longer relevant, but at the same time the producer of much great art.
Did Wright's visits to Verona, Florence and other cities in Italy convince him that America, for all of its promise and beauty, would never produce anything as remarkable as Da Vinci's paintings, or Virgil's poetry? It's hard to say.
From the earlier, "Ohio" geography, is a remarkable poem about President Warren G. Harding, who was born and is buried in Ohio:
"America goes on, goes on.
Laughing, and Harding was a fool.
...
"Whatever moon and rain may be,
the hearts of men are merciless."
And later, in the Italy, or more properly Tuscany phase, is "The Journey":
"Many men
Have searched all over Tuscany and never found
What I found there, the heart of the light
Itself shelled and leaved, balancing
On filaments themselves falling>"
Which seems, to me, to echo William Carlos Williams' famous admonition, "it is difficult to get the news from poems/Men die every day for lack of what is found there." But is also distinctly Wright-ean. At least to the extent I can say that having only read this volume.
If you love poetry, American poetry and also the American Midwest, and Italy, this relatively slim volume is for you.
For years, "Selected Poems" was used to support the printer in my home office, in the first house my wife and I bought in Tulsa. No particular "rhyme" (LOL) or reason, other than the book was available when I needed something to help prop up the printer.
Fast forward a few years, and I was able to "recover" this remarkable volume, and recently finished (finally) reading it. In my life Wellness program, I am taught to "not regret the past, nor seek to shut the door on it". So, I am actually glad I didn't read "Selected Poems" until now.
Why?
It requires a careful, luxuriant reading. Wright was a major figure in late 20th Century American Poetry, who may (or may not) have committed suicide at the house of a friend. Regardless, he is, sadly, gone from this world and the world is poorer for the loss. The "Selected" was posthumously collected and curated by his widow, and also the poet Robert Bly.
For someone coming to Wright for the first time, the "Selected" is an excellent way in, as it features poems from, I believe, all of his published works.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Wright's poetry reminds me of the other great American poet with that last name, Charles Wright (unrelated). James Wright surveys an America that is both beautiful and terrible, coming as he seems to be doing out of the horror of, in his earlier works, The Vietnam War. But the War isn't really a character in these poems, just something that seems to hover over, or inform the language and subject matter.
Two main geographies dominate the "Selected" - Wright's home state of Ohio (where, as the song says, "four dead") and Italy. To some extent, these two locations form poles between which Wright's poetic project seems to oscillate. Part of this is Wright, in Ohio and adjacent states, remembering his childhood and his Father (not flatteringly) and part of this is an older Wright, reflecting on Italy as both a country that is perhaps no longer relevant, but at the same time the producer of much great art.
Did Wright's visits to Verona, Florence and other cities in Italy convince him that America, for all of its promise and beauty, would never produce anything as remarkable as Da Vinci's paintings, or Virgil's poetry? It's hard to say.
From the earlier, "Ohio" geography, is a remarkable poem about President Warren G. Harding, who was born and is buried in Ohio:
"America goes on, goes on.
Laughing, and Harding was a fool.
...
"Whatever moon and rain may be,
the hearts of men are merciless."
And later, in the Italy, or more properly Tuscany phase, is "The Journey":
"Many men
Have searched all over Tuscany and never found
What I found there, the heart of the light
Itself shelled and leaved, balancing
On filaments themselves falling>"
Which seems, to me, to echo William Carlos Williams' famous admonition, "it is difficult to get the news from poems/Men die every day for lack of what is found there." But is also distinctly Wright-ean. At least to the extent I can say that having only read this volume.
If you love poetry, American poetry and also the American Midwest, and Italy, this relatively slim volume is for you.
Read
May 23, 2025What I would give for the ability to write about my hometown the way James Wright writes about Martins Ferry, Ohio.
Lines I loved:
High water is not trite in southern Ohio. Nothing is trite along a river. My father died a good death. To die a good death means to live one's life. I don't say a good life. I say a life.
Even after the sun has gone down beyond the pine trees and the moon has not yet come across the lake water, you can walk down white roads. The dark is a dark you can see beyond, into a deep place here and there. Whatever light there is left, it has room enough to move around in. . . . I never touched a blue spruce before the moon came, for fear it would say something in a false voice. You can only hear a spruce tree speak in its own silence.
When I think of Ralph Neal's name, I feel some kind of ice breaking open in me.
the lights / Have gone out on the stone bridge, / Where I stand, alone, / A dark city on one shore, / And, on the other, / A dark forest.
Though love can be scarcely imaginable Hell, / By God, it is not a lie.
The only tongue I can write in / is my native Ohioan. / There, most people are poor. / I thought I could not stand it / To go home any more, / Yet I go home, every year, / To calm down my wild mother, / And talk long with my brother.
Lines I loved:
High water is not trite in southern Ohio. Nothing is trite along a river. My father died a good death. To die a good death means to live one's life. I don't say a good life. I say a life.
Even after the sun has gone down beyond the pine trees and the moon has not yet come across the lake water, you can walk down white roads. The dark is a dark you can see beyond, into a deep place here and there. Whatever light there is left, it has room enough to move around in. . . . I never touched a blue spruce before the moon came, for fear it would say something in a false voice. You can only hear a spruce tree speak in its own silence.
When I think of Ralph Neal's name, I feel some kind of ice breaking open in me.
the lights / Have gone out on the stone bridge, / Where I stand, alone, / A dark city on one shore, / And, on the other, / A dark forest.
Though love can be scarcely imaginable Hell, / By God, it is not a lie.
The only tongue I can write in / is my native Ohioan. / There, most people are poor. / I thought I could not stand it / To go home any more, / Yet I go home, every year, / To calm down my wild mother, / And talk long with my brother.
August 20, 2025
my second poet from ohio who loves writing about ohio....maybe i should go to ohio at this pt
June 22, 2021
I find Wright's work kind of uneven, and I'm not a huge fan of his prose poems or the pieces about Italy. However, when he hits the bullseye, it's some of the best American poetry of the mid-20th century, the songs of the torched and gutted Midwest. Pieces that will stick with me for a long time include "To a Hostess Saying Good Night," "Two Poems about President Harding," "Small Frogs Killed on the Highway," "With the Shell of a Hermit Crab," "In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned," and the most famous of them all, "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." If these poems constitute "wasting your life," then I can only hope to waste mine half as well.
July 17, 2025
So this collection was mid af and reminded me that poetry can be sometimes far its own ass in importance that reading it can be discouraging.
However, then there are shining moments that remind me why poetry is worth writing, art worth making, and emotions worth feeling.
In Saint Judas, "Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten/ The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,/ I held the man for nothing in my arms."
Good shit. 3 stars. Middle of the road with some poems worth getting excited over.
However, then there are shining moments that remind me why poetry is worth writing, art worth making, and emotions worth feeling.
In Saint Judas, "Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten/ The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,/ I held the man for nothing in my arms."
Good shit. 3 stars. Middle of the road with some poems worth getting excited over.
November 15, 2022
There's a poem I used to keep in my wallet, scrawled in blue ink from a cheap pen on a piece of ragged old browning paper torn from the back of some story anthology from middle school.
I'd take it out and look at it sometimes when the mood struck. Everyone should do this kind of thing-- you should have something short and moving and potent to read when you're bored or you're waiting in line or something. Just take it out and read it over to yourself and memorize it. You'll keep it with you like a locket.
The Jewel
There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.
This book is filled with stuff like that. There are others but I lack the will to transcribe them all.
I'd take it out and look at it sometimes when the mood struck. Everyone should do this kind of thing-- you should have something short and moving and potent to read when you're bored or you're waiting in line or something. Just take it out and read it over to yourself and memorize it. You'll keep it with you like a locket.
The Jewel
There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.
This book is filled with stuff like that. There are others but I lack the will to transcribe them all.
April 7, 2025
Wright wrote more poems that took a grim view of humanity and the societies we create than he did transcendent poems like "A Blessing," which is his mode I prefer. His later poems seemed less likely to be dark. Curiously, though his home town is often depicted in dismal terms, his love for it comes through also.
I prefer his more uplifting work and so the links I provide below are entirely skewed that way. It was interesting to me that he mentioned horses in poems more than just about any other poet I've ever read--and yet, besides "A Blessing," I didn't particularly like any of them despite being a horse lover.
I was surprised to learn that he also wrote prose poems (or micro-memoirs--whatever you want to call them).
If anyone is curious about James Wright, I think this is a great place to start. It has 22 poems from his lauded The Branch Will Not Break. It was edited posthumously by a poet-friend Robert Bly and Wright's wife Anne so it covers his entire life, as opposed to his Pulitzer winning Collected Poems of 1971, which would not include any of his later work in the 70s.
Here are links to the Wright poems that are my favorites (with one exception: The Gift of Change, which is a prose poem):
A Blessing
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
The Jewel
https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol...
Milkweed
https://poetrysociety.org/poetry-in-m...
The Journey
https://www.best-poems.net/james_wrig...
Small Frogs Killed on the Highway
https://www.poeticous.com/james-wrigh...
I prefer his more uplifting work and so the links I provide below are entirely skewed that way. It was interesting to me that he mentioned horses in poems more than just about any other poet I've ever read--and yet, besides "A Blessing," I didn't particularly like any of them despite being a horse lover.
I was surprised to learn that he also wrote prose poems (or micro-memoirs--whatever you want to call them).
If anyone is curious about James Wright, I think this is a great place to start. It has 22 poems from his lauded The Branch Will Not Break. It was edited posthumously by a poet-friend Robert Bly and Wright's wife Anne so it covers his entire life, as opposed to his Pulitzer winning Collected Poems of 1971, which would not include any of his later work in the 70s.
Here are links to the Wright poems that are my favorites (with one exception: The Gift of Change, which is a prose poem):
A Blessing
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
The Jewel
https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol...
Milkweed
https://poetrysociety.org/poetry-in-m...
The Journey
https://www.best-poems.net/james_wrig...
Small Frogs Killed on the Highway
https://www.poeticous.com/james-wrigh...
June 24, 2022
So this is a selection that covers his whole career. Now, I already knew (and loved) a small portion of James Wright poems before this, oddly enough all from his third collection, The Branch Will Not Break. What was weird about reading this, was discovering that the vast majority of his "good" work (or at least work that I found compelling) came from that collection specifically. The rest of his career has occasional interesting pieces, but there's just a massive difference in quality between The Branch Will Not Break (incredible, unforgettable) and everything else (pretty meh). Not sure I've ever seen anything like it, really. If you're interested in Wright, I suggest just finding a copy of that collection.
November 30, 2017
Wright's poetry transcends itself. This of course sounds like a bunch of "phooey," but Wright's poems do something that so often people try yet fail to do: it captures the paradox of the everyday moment. He can at once sit on a sewer, surrounded by waste, darkness, and despair, and see the beautiful waterfall below, or lie in a hammock, looking at the beauty and marvelous livestock surrounding him and see his failures. The poems have a very distinct style but never go stale. This collection represents Wright very well, and as a poet, Wright represents the beauty and sorrow in nature that is both the thesis and antithesis of the common notion of the Machine in the Garden.
August 28, 2022
James Wright was a superbly sublime and magnetic poet.
March 1, 2023
“my moon or more” 3
May 3, 2024
He is still learning in the early poems and I think the posthumus poems are awful but the middle of this book is great.
December 8, 2016
Wild sadness amid the vicious beauty.
Mutterings over the Crib of a Deaf Child
"How will he hear the bell at school
Arrange the broken afternoon,
And know to run across the cool
Grasses where the starlings cry,
Or understand the day is gone?"
Well, someone lifting curious brows
Will take the measure of the clock.
And he will see the birchen boughs
Outside sagging dark from the sky,
And the shade crawling upon the rock.
"And how will he know to rise at morning?
His mother has other sons to waken,
She has the stove she must build to burning
Before the coals of the nighttime die;
And he never stirs when he is shaken."
I take it the air affects his skin,
And you remember, when you were young,
Sometimes you could feel the dawn begin,
And the fire would call you, by and by,
Out of the bed and bring you along.
"Well, good enough. To serve his needs
All kinds of arrangements can be made.
But what will you do if his finger bleeds?
Or a bobwhite whistles invisibly
And flutes like an angel off in the shade?"
He will learn pain. And, as for the bird,
It is always darkening when that comes out.
I will putter as though I had not heard,
And lift him into my arms and sing
Whether he hears my song or not.
Mutterings over the Crib of a Deaf Child
"How will he hear the bell at school
Arrange the broken afternoon,
And know to run across the cool
Grasses where the starlings cry,
Or understand the day is gone?"
Well, someone lifting curious brows
Will take the measure of the clock.
And he will see the birchen boughs
Outside sagging dark from the sky,
And the shade crawling upon the rock.
"And how will he know to rise at morning?
His mother has other sons to waken,
She has the stove she must build to burning
Before the coals of the nighttime die;
And he never stirs when he is shaken."
I take it the air affects his skin,
And you remember, when you were young,
Sometimes you could feel the dawn begin,
And the fire would call you, by and by,
Out of the bed and bring you along.
"Well, good enough. To serve his needs
All kinds of arrangements can be made.
But what will you do if his finger bleeds?
Or a bobwhite whistles invisibly
And flutes like an angel off in the shade?"
He will learn pain. And, as for the bird,
It is always darkening when that comes out.
I will putter as though I had not heard,
And lift him into my arms and sing
Whether he hears my song or not.
September 18, 2007
James Wright grew up in Martins Ferry, Ohio, not far from where I live. I liked this collection very much. He writes in accessible language, even though his meanings and references aren't always transparent. There is a certain amount of descriptive nature poetry and prose poems, but many of his poems have to do with memories from his Ohio childhood, in which family relationships and thoughts about life, death, loss and meaning are sketched in evocative and often surreal ways.
I particularly liked one poem about the last whorehouse in Wheeling, W.Va., where he fantasizes seeing the women flow out of the house every evening and walk down into the Ohio
River (the river is a major theme in his poems). Perhaps because I've seen both cities, I loved the ending of this poem, which goes:
"I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?
"For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
in Bridgeport, Ohio.
"And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio."
I particularly liked one poem about the last whorehouse in Wheeling, W.Va., where he fantasizes seeing the women flow out of the house every evening and walk down into the Ohio
River (the river is a major theme in his poems). Perhaps because I've seen both cities, I loved the ending of this poem, which goes:
"I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?
"For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
in Bridgeport, Ohio.
"And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio."
October 12, 2009
I really liked the poems they chose for the "Selected Poems"--I read Collected Poems also but I think this one is better because it features some of Wright's later poems.
James Wright is amazing and if I could give over 5 stars for several of his "middle" books (such as Shall We Gather at the River, The Branch Will Not Break, and later To a Blossoming Pear Tree) I certainly would. Ten star books! Yay! I didn't give this book 5 stars because some of Wright's earlier work is maybe a little bit too formal and sometimes lacks that kind of breath-taking quality of his later work.
A must-read poet.
James Wright is amazing and if I could give over 5 stars for several of his "middle" books (such as Shall We Gather at the River, The Branch Will Not Break, and later To a Blossoming Pear Tree) I certainly would. Ten star books! Yay! I didn't give this book 5 stars because some of Wright's earlier work is maybe a little bit too formal and sometimes lacks that kind of breath-taking quality of his later work.
A must-read poet.
April 9, 2008
This is the kind of poetry I like. Melancholy, imagistic, a glimpse of hope but not much more. It's beautiful and sad and reads like the various rooms in an art museum.
February 15, 2009
Sad beautiful meditations on life, death, family, hard work, rough men, drunkards, hobos, shy women. Moments of humor,and rueful self-amusement punctuate his work.
May 20, 2013
Over and over again, I read this.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews