Scar Tissue: Poems

by Charles Wright

Hard to imagine that no one counts,
that only things endure.
Unlike the seasons, our shirts don't shed,
Whatever we see does not see us,
however hard we look,
The rain in its silver earrings against the oak trunks,
The rain in its second skin.
--from "Scar Tissue II"

In his new collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality--"thing is not an image"--but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject--language and "the ghost of god." And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, "something un-ordinary persists."

Scar Tissue is a groundbreaking work from a poet who "illuminates and exalts the entire astonishing spectrum of existence" (Booklist).

Genres: Poetry

73 pages, Hardcover

First published July 25, 2006

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

[Ken]

Charles Wright may still be alive, but his poetry reads a bit like an artifact. With so much modern poetry devoted to identity, identity, identity, Wright still writes about nature. But it's more than that. Time, too. And mortality, the Muse of old that never gets old.

I suppose you could call this outdated. On the other hand, if you've been reading everyone's navel-lint poetry, you might call it refreshing. That's on you.

I'll share one below as long as you appreciate that GR cannot handle a poem's indentations of lines, and if there's one thing Wright likes, it's indentations of lines. Oh, well. Take in the words alone, then, and know that any line NOT starting with a capital letter was indented in the original.


Matins

Sunlight like Vaseline in the trees,
smear and shine, smear and shine.
Ten days of rain and now the echoing forth of blank and blue
Through the evergreens.
Deer stand on their hind legs
in the bright meadow grasses.
The sound of the lilac upsurge rings bells for the bees.
Cloud puffs, like mortar rounds from the afterlife,
pockmark the sky.
Time, in its crystal goblet, laps and recedes, laps and recedes.

If we were the Rapture's child, if we
Were the Manichean boy,
If we were the Bodhisattva baby,
today would be a good day
To let the light in, or send it out.
We're not, however. We're Nature's nobodies,
and we'd do well
To put on the wu wei slippers and find a hard spot
To sit on,
sinking like nothing through the timed tides of ourselves.


NOTE: wu wei in Taoism and Zen Buddhism, unmotivated action; in Chinese, literally "nondoing."

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite of Charles Wright's work as he's recycling a lot of what he's done previously (give me Southern Cross, Zone Journals, Chickamagua....), but still, Wright has a lovely line, a wondrous ability with the image, and an original lyric voice.

[Diann Blakely]

Charles Wright, one of the most illustrious poets to emerge from the South since James Dickey, confesses multiple times in *Quartets* and Halflife*, his already classic books of interviews and “improvisations” published by the University of Michigan Press, that he’s the only Southerner he knows who can’t tell a story. Keeping in mind Wright’s theological obsessions, the best response seems to be “Thank God.” So much has been written about narrative as the archetypal characteristic of Southern writing it’s possible to imagine that not even the poets of Wright’s generation, now in their 60s, ever turned on the radio or sang in the church choir. Surely, in the wake of Katrina, many are more cognizant now of the South’s musical or lyrical contributions to American culture. The effect of blues, bluegrass, Dixieland, gospel, jazz, Western swing and traditional country has inarguably been as strong an influence on Southern poetry for the past 50 years as what has been absorbed, say, from Nashville’s high-culture poetic troika of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren. These men wrote at the time when the Delta blues was reaching its apogee, a poetic influence that now seems incontrovertibly greater than the Fugitives’. Furthermore, it’s not as though the King James Bible, so often cited as the major influence on all Southern writing, was ever solely, or even primarily, a narrative influence. The Fugitives’ fellow traveler, St. Louis native T. S. Eliot (whose adoration for the raunchy English music hall is evident in the 20th century’s most important poem, *The Waste Land* implied that all religious texts are finally lyric in their lasting effects because they are meant to be recited or chanted. Wright’s most typical poems circle between his native East Tennessee; coastal California, where he taught for many years; middle Virginia, where he has lived and held a professorship for two decades in Charlottesville; and Italy, where he worked for military intelligence and fell in love with the people and landscape and food and wine—and the integration of these and Roman Catholicism. He nonetheless remained “a God-fearing agnostic,” much like his greatest literary influence, the Italophile Ezra Pound. From Pound, Wright took a gorgeously melodic and highly variable free verse, purged it of wacko political and economic ideas and created some of the most indelible lines and phrases of contemporary verse: the light of the setting sun appearing “like slit wrists,” is just one mordantly lingering gem from *Scar Tissue*. Wright also adopted Pound’s reverence for Chinese poets, like Li Po, who teach a stoic removal from life’s dull and daily sorrows. The Tao and its poets have dominated, arguably, Wright’s most recent collections (see *The World of the Ten Thousand Things* and *Buffalo Yoga*), but as *Scar Tissue* makes clear, Wright has returned to the strength of earlier books like *Country Music* and *Southern Cross*, which were typified by more engagement with the physical world than by abstractions concerning it. *Scar Tissue’s power derives from the constant, rapid-fire juxtaposition between those airy habitations and local names among which Wright has long lived and the everyday vocabulary of postmodern existence, including “Weed-Eaters.” While Wright has used broken lines whose units are separated by white space for most of his career, never have they seemed a more perfect and fitting embodiment of his subject matter, which is presented in triumphant, if sometimes valedictory, terms in *Scar Tissue*. Furthermore, this truncation by blankness of almost unbearably gorgeous sonic phrasings is reminiscent of another aspect of Southern life and literature that nearly no one mentions: the alternation between easy, mellifluous music and tense, nerve-ridden or downright hostile silence. “Landscape was never a subject matter, it was a technique,” Wright says in “The Minor Art of Self-Defense,” continuing, "I stole its silences, I stepped to its hue and cry. // Language was always the subject matter, the idea of God / The ghost that over my little world / Hovered, my mouthpiece for meaning, my claw and bright beak . . . ." And this language of claw and beak leaves ample scar tissue—or “proud flesh,” as we say Down Here—all its own.



(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE /Village Voice Media)

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hit or miss poetry. Charles Wright seems abstract and clever, two things that I can enjoy very much (after all, my favorite poet is Wallace Stevens). But Stevens grapples with the abstract in the immediate, whereas Wright often seems to create a clever form as a vehicle. Sometimes the occasional well-thought metaphor is precisely right to describe the phenomenon, and it works -- in Transparencies, for example. My favorite line:

"Our lives are summer cotton, it seems, and good for a season".

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

(8/10) This is the second book I've read in a couple months titled "Scar Tissue". Get some more original titles, peeps. That aside, this is a pretty solid book of poetry. I was a little unsure in the beginning, feeling that the poems were too too abstract and had just a trace of Orientalism, but after that it picked up, especially in the third section. Wright, like every American poet you've never heard of, has a list of accolades as long as his arm and he mostly lives up to them here. He definitely falls neatly into the American poetic tradition, with Wallace Stevens being a clear inspiration, and Wright taking his own stab at the questions of representation and truth that have bedeviled America's poets for at least century. He doesn't solve those questions, but the point isn't to solve them -- it's to create something meaningful in the process, and Wright certainly has.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd like to give this 3 and a half stars-- but that's not an option. There are some amazing lines and excellent poems in here. I think it has been ages since I've read any of Charles Wrights' work so it feels like dropping in on an old friend. I suspect anytime I read Wright, Merwin, or Ferlinghetti that's how it feels- the friend you have been missing but didn't know you were missing.

I'm not a big "GOD" person, in fact, I tend to eschew anything to do with it, therefore, a lot of the poems meandered a little too much into that territory. I think if you don't mind that sort of "holy" (in the Christian sense)contemplation then this book might get another star from you.

[Meghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite possibly the most engaged I have ever felt when reading poetry, which is saying something. I usually have to focus really hard on not daydreaming about other things while I read poetry. Charles Wright's use sensory language and imagery is fantastic. Abstraction is blended easily with concrete details, making beautiful poems. Many of the poems deal with age, memories, and landscape. It truly was a pleasure to read this. It's no wonder that Charles Wright is Poet Laureate of the United States.

[chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The world in its dark grace.
I have tried to record it.
-- "A Short History of My Life"

"We are nothing but footmen at the coach of language,
We open and close the door."
-- "Confessions of a Song and Dance Man"

Memory has no memory. Or metaphor.
It moves as it wants to move,
and never measures the distance.
People have died of thirst in crossing a memory.
Our lives are summer cotton, it seems,
and good for a season.
The wind blows, the rivers run, and waves come to a head.
Memory's logo is the abyss, and that's no metaphor.
-- "Transparencies"

The thread that dangles us
between a dark and a darker dark,
Is luminous, sure, but smooth sided.
Don't touch it here, and don't touch it there.
Don't touch it, in fact, anywhere --
Let it dangle and hold us hard, let it flash and swing.
-- "Scar Tissue"

The world has an infinite beauty, but not, always, for us.
-- "Scar Tissue II"

In spring there is autumn in my heart,
My spirit, outside of nature, like slow mist in the trees,
Looking for somewhere to dissipate.
-- "China Traces"

We're Nature's nobodies,
and we'd do well
To put on the wu wei slippers and find a hard spot
To sit on,
sinking like nothing through the timed tides of ourselves.
-- "Matins"

Cloud-scarce Montana morning.
July, with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map,
Huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things,
Tweets on the evergreen stumps,
swallows treading the air,
The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you,
Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for.
-- "The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole Does Not Appear"

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poets.

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the idea of Charles Wright, a serious-minded man, vaguely down South somewhere, sitting on his porch looking gravely out at the setting sun, the rising moon and what these celestial bodies are doing to the pines out by the fence line and wondering what in the world we are doing here in the first place, haunted by regret and beauty and death...

"The wind is my music, the west wind, and cold water
In constant motion
I have an ear
For such things, and the sound of hte goatsucker at night.
And the click of twenty-two cents in my pants pocket
That sets my feet to twitching,
that clears space in my heart"
("Confessions of a Song and Dance Man, p. 15)

Oops! I meant goatsuckers. Or this:

"Sunlight is blowing westward across the unshadowed meadow,
Night, in its shallow puddles,
still liquid and loose in the trees.
The world is a desolate garden,
No distillation of downed grasses,
no stopping the clouds, coming at us one by one."
("Images from the Kingdom of Things" p. 14)

I do not dislike these maunderings. But I don't much like them either, and that might be a problem with me rather than the poems of Charles Wright. These are poems, doing poem-like things in turn-of-the-century way by American poets (this book was published in 2006). Man vs. nature, man vs. man...what else is there, really? But it is not the "what" of these poems that fail so much as the "how" - how to accomplish something not redolent of the typical American poetry-professor's poem?

The title poem is uncharacteristically long for this collection, and I got the feeling the poet was swinging for the fence here. I wish poets swung for the fence all the time - but it is risky. For one thing, long poems usually should be short poems, and this two-decker runs from pp. 33-53; not an epic, exactly, but from what little I read, it needed a Mass Extinction Event. Here's the opener for Part II:

"Scar Tissue II

Time, for us, is a straight line,
on which we hang our narratives.
For landscape, however, it all is a circling
From season to season, the snake's tail in the snake's mouth,
No line for a story line.
In its vast wheel, in its endless turning,
no lives count, not one.

Hard to imagine that no one counts,
that only things endure.
Unlike the seasons, our shirts don't shed,
Whatever we see does not see us,
however hard we look,
The rain in its silver earrings against the oak trunks,
The rain in its second skin.

Pity the people, Lord, pity their going forth and their coming back,
Pity their sumptuous barricades
against the dark.
Show them the way the dirt works.
Show them its sift, the aftermath and the in-between.
Wet days are their own reward for now,
litter's lapse and the pebble's gleam..." (p. 40)


There's an awful lot that goes wrong here, I think. This is not a compliment: it reminds me of Frank Bidart, if not quite as vatic and pretentious. Snake's tails in snake's mouth, a "vast wheel" and "endless turning." The landscape isn't circling here so much as it is being chewed up, and clipping silver earrings on the rain or a Roethke-esque "show them the way the dirt works" won't fix that. The only landscape here is American poetry by the acre, which is how we like to produce it these days, although farm yield and steel tonnage output is not an aesthetic. The dab of 1960s Scandinavian Eurotrash magic realism (those earrings) do not improve things. But this sort of thing goes down easy, murmurs of assent in the lecture hall, the poet reading it modestly, a bit of a hush in his voice. "Bleh," as Snoopy used to say.

But most of the poems are not so big. Here maybe, is a more characteristic moment, a kind of Ars Poetica perhaps (in its entirety):

"High Country Spring

It's not so much the description, it's what you describe,
Green pox on the aspen limbs,
Lilac bud-bursts set to go off,
suppuration of late May.

The world is a tiny object, a drop of pine sap,
Amber of robin's beak, like that,
backlit by sunlight,

Pulling the glow deep inside."
(p. 54)

What's wrong with that? Really, I can find nothing to fault; the diction never quite succumbs to the usual American poetic overwrought or clichéd. As for an approach to the World, I can hardly improve upon a drop of pine sap or robin's beaks. It certainly avoids what Mary Oliver is always doing - "connecting" with nature or, what so many other American poets do in nature do, name stuff in lists (blackberries, blackberries, blackberries). The speaker (or in this poem, the describer) is modest, butterflies do not create a springtime nimbus around his head, as butterflies seem to do in other poet's back yards. It is brief (51 words). I did not cringe typing it out. But frankly, I am a little bored. So let me type out another one, on the next page:

"China Traces

Nature contains no negatives.
Nothing is lost there,
The word is. Except the word.

In spring there is autumn in my heart.
My spirit, outside of nature, like slow mist in the trees,
Looking for somewhere to dissipate.

I write out my charms and spells
Against the passage of light
and gathering evil
Each morning. Each evening hands them back

Out of the nothing nothing comes.
The rain keeps falling,
As we expected, the bitter and the boundaryless rain.
The grass leaves no footprints,
the creek keeps on eating its one word.

In the night, the light assembles the stars
and tightens their sash." (p. 55)

Okay, finally, a moment of genuine surprise ("tightens their sash"), rather than the merely competent, than Wright's usual reserved sure-footedness or tiresomeness of the usual American poetry trope ("Against the passage of light..."). But it isn't enough for me, which is to say no, I don't care much for this poem, until the last couplet; a little bolus of surprise; a few neuro-chemical switches turned on that weren't on duty this shift. Which may mean I like the whole poem, at least to some extent. To some extent: "Out of the nothing nothing comes." is kind of spooky in a sub-Wallace Stevens way, but I feel like Stevens did it better in "The Snow Man" - so why do it again? "The grass leaves no footprints / the creek keeps on eating its one word" comes off for me as James Wright at his worst, another Deep Image whiff with a eye-rolling dab of cleverness ("grass leaves" and Leaves of Grass, I suppose). And so as much as I appreciate the little surprise at the end, the poem for me is otherwise inert.

Is it fair to always need a surprise, a punch line? Probably not. But the older I get, the more I think of literature as being akin to all the other things people get addicted to - gambling for instance; we keep tugging on that one-armed bandit waiting to hit the jackpot, but jackpots don't come along very often, and the House always wins. The odds are always lousy in the American Poetry Casino, but with Charles Wright there are just enough payouts to make it worth plugging in my quarters from time to time (this is a library discard book, purchased for a quarter, incidentally), but I'm never going to visit enough to reach Preferred Customer status. The same old combinations, the "grass/creek/stars" are not jackpots.

***

It must be hard, being a poet. You get up in the morning, the sun is doing something unusual or gorgeous through a gap in your bedroom curtains. A bird twitters. You'd just had a dream about an old high school friend you haven't seen in 20 (or 40) years. The cat walks in and says "marrrow." What do you do with this? That Charles Wright is trying to do something with this - rather than, say, tell me how unfair the whole wide world is, or how sad he gets over some stupid, tragic thing about the government. I like that he's not telling me how to vote. I like that he doesn't seem to think he is qualified for saving souls, his own or anybody else's.

"The world in its rags and ghostly raiment calls to us
With grinding and green gristle
Wherever we turn..." (p. 59)

Yeah, it does call to us, maybe. There's far too many moments of "Through the buoyant dark of the pine forest..." for me - the idea of a "buoyant" dark just seems so typically, boringly "poetic." And the book is full of this sort of thing, these tropes, these easy ways out. "All my darks are dark," I want to say, un-poetically.

Then there is the problem of being not just a poet, but a successful poet - by "successful poet" I mean in the USA in the past 50 years. You get up in the morning and you also have all this incontrovertible evidence that you are a success. All those books on the shelf with your name on 'em (some in translation!). The university website extolling your achievements. Former students blurbing your books and asking for letters of recommendation. The paid readings, the paid summer workshops, the university pension and health care - the successful career! There is the Wikipedia page, of course, as with so many contemporary American poets, strangely truncated:

"Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) 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 50th Poet Laureate of the United States....

Beside the award-winning books Country Music (1982) and Black Zodiac (1997), Wright has published Chickamauga, Buffalo Yoga, Negative Blue, Appalachia, The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990, Zone Journals and Hard Freight. His work also appears in Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts." (Wikipedia)

Note that second paragraph; of all the journals in which he's been published, his appearance in Blackbird ("an online journal") is the only one noted; as if Henry Ford's article noted he sold a Model A to Wilbur Drudge in Wabash, Indiana in 1933. But Blackbird is published by the University of Virginia, where Wright taught from 1983-2010, so somebody there is editing his Wikipedia page, I'm guessing, putting in a plug for the hometown lit journal (online) while writing up an esteemed former faculty member. There is something about this that strikes me as being very sad.

The Poetry Foundation can be relied on for a more complete, if fulsome profile:

"...Wright has set a prolific pace since A Short History of the Shadow, publishing a new collection nearly every year. These later works often return to the shorter poems and deep elegies of his early work. According to Joe Moffett, in his book Understanding Charles Wright, the collection Buffalo Yoga (2004) centers on the “difficulty of loss,” and mostly eschews the problems of language and representation that marked Wright’s middle period. Though formally the book contains an assortment of styles—from short lyrics to sequences—a set of overarching themes (the search for meaning, the transience of life) continue to link the poems together. In Buffalo Yoga, and the books that follow, Wright’s central preoccupation is mortality, the passage of time, and the inevitability of death, usually his own. Scar Tissue (2006), which was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize, fittingly begins with a stock-taking piece called “Appalachian Farewell.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

So Scar Tissue, the book reviewed here, is just one of many, part of his later "prolific pace" and dismissed with a bit of "stock-taking" and another big poetry prize. According to Wikipedia, Wright has published 31 books (including collected's and selected's and two books of essays). Sure, Wright is nearly 90 and this represents a lifetime's achievement, but so many books! Therein lies a paradox: the undeniable evidence of poetic achievement in gross tonnage, and yet enough poems to choke a horse, or a reading public. Wright's best work is lost within the runaway kudzu-esque snarl of his own output. Where to begin? Or, when faced with such a tangle, why bother?

As I sometimes do, I did a desultory Google image search of the poet or writer I am reviewing, and I came across a YouTube video of Wright's reading from Scar Tissue when he won the Griffin Prize; quotes from the poem are displayed as the poet is reading, which is a really good idea for any poetry reading. This is what caught my eye:

"It's hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,
How quickly all that we've done
Is unremembered and unforgiven,
how quickly
Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls,
How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us,
And everything that we are becomes what we are not..."

(from "The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole Does Not Appear" p. 68 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF9Y9...)

Yeah, I agree: "unremembered and unforgiven." It makes for a good, if not especially original thought, a dorm room poster; it caught my eye anyway. As of February 7, 2022, the video has 9,513 views since it was posted on January 23, 2009, and 66 "likes." That's more cultural traction than most contemporary American poets get. And Wright does not seem unaware of what all of this, our likes and views and careers and "unforgivens," all add up to - nothing, really. Most American retirees are worried about their golf swing or cholesterol or digestion. I'm glad Charles Wright worried about other, vaster things. Unfortunately, "The Woodpecker Pecks" devolves to this:

"The grasses asleep in their green slips
Before the noon can roust them,
The sweet oblivion of the everyday
like a warm waistcoat
Over the cold and endless body of memory..." (p. 68)

That "warm waistcoat of memory" is original, yet unfortunately so, I think, something A. E. Houseman would do after one too many glasses of sherry. And "endless body of memory" is not original at all, rather the sort of thing poets say when they aren't really paying much attention, despite all their attention-to-stuff pretensions. Poems only happen if the words are right; intentions and sensitivity don't really matter.

Reviewer's confession: I did not read the whole book; I almost never do when I tuck into a book of verse. Although I take responsibility for this, I do not blame myself; the poems are the problem, not the reader. The only reason I stop reading Emily Dickinson is from exhaustion. Stevens, Plath, Bishop...early Lowell, 77 Dream Songs; I don't stop until I can't stand it (I'd say the same thing of the underrated Dorothy Parker and Richard Brautigan too). True poetry lovers who love reading poetry have far more endurance than I do and they'd be kinder to this book than I am being - as are most of the other Goodreads reviews, for instance. (But I did "like" his YouTube video, so now there are 67 "likes" - my cultural good deed for the day).

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 2006 collection by Charles Wright describes the "scar tissue" of living and of nostalgia for real or imagined better times. Wright is not a "nature poet" so much as a philosophical one as Coleridge described Wordsworth, one who uses his relationship with nature to explore and expose life's challenge of finding meaning. The experience of sunset becomes an analogy for human biography:

"If night is our last address
This is the pace we moved from,
Backs on fire, our futures hard-edged and sure to arrive....

"And where are we headed for?
The country of Narrative, that dark territory
Which spells out our stories in sentences, which gives them an end and beginning..."

Wright's poetry challenges us---not with obscurity or experimental language, but with living fully awake and aware, where "Something unordinary persists,/ Something unstill, neversleeping, just possible past reason."

The time spent being so challenged is well worth it.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's some excellent imagery here. But I can only stand so much poetry about trees and mountains and nature and blah, blah blah...this will stay on the Currently Reading shelf till I can regroup to finish it or toss it aside with all the others I never get through.

I'm glad I gave this a good chance...the latter part of the book is what I liked best. The poerful imagery continues and the subject matter: more of the human condition, is more to my liking.

[Lane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up because a friend told me the way I write poetry reminded her of his work. I really liked some of these. Others didn’t resonate as much with me. Ultimately it just made me miss home.

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyric poems, succinct, with some interesting typographical moves. Many really nice poems here. Pensive and language-driven.

[Irinel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Scar Tissue" stands as a profound meditation on the ephemeral nature of life and the enduring resonance of memory. The language of the poems, haunting and beautiful, is imbued with a melancholic undertone that echoes the fleeting nature of existence. Each poem is a journey into the depths of introspection. As Wright himself puts it, "We are nothing but footmen at the coach of language, We open and close the door" (Confessions of a Song and Dance Man). Each journey is nothing else than a journey into the heart of human experience, a meditation on life and death, two incommensurable domains; with 'memory' acting as a bridge, or even to a certain extent if we were to follow Simone Weil, a metaxu between the two.

Through Wright's musings on time and mortality, one is not drawn into a mere casual contemplation, but pushed through a thoughtful inquiry on the nature of existence. These musings mirror in their rhythmicity the natural landscapes that often form the backdrop of such introspections. "Time, for us, is a straight line, on which we hang our narratives. For landscape, however, it all is a circling From season to season, the snake’s tail in the snake’s mouth, No line for a story line." (Scar Tissue II)

_
"These are our voices, active, passive and suppressed, and these are our syllables. We used them to love your daughters, we used them to love your sons. We traveled, we stayed home, we counted our days out like prescription pills. In the end, like everyone, we had too much to say." (The Silent Generation III)

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avoiding hyperbole and the spontaneous temptation to yell, "Holy-ish: this is the greatest thing ever written," Charles Wright's Scar Tissue is the most emotionally accessible and engaging collection of poems I have ever read.

Simply put, Scar Tissue is one human heart speaking to another. Wright is a master of connecting language, nature, and God, as he shows us the human condition in all its conflicted beauty.

Everything is at tension in these poems; everything is simultaneously fixed, yet in flux.

Aren't we, too: standing still, yet moving at turbo speed at the same time?

Scar Tissue is on point with this tension and unleashes its vivid, yet succinct, imagery to weave this tension into themes of memory, the natural world, life and God.

Watch this and you'll get the point:

"Charles Wright reads 'The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole Does Not Appear.'"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF9Y9K...

Hyperbole now in full gear: Charles Wright's Scar Tissue is the best damn work of poetry I have ever read and enjoyed.

The bar is set.

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well crafted but depressing, sometimes verging on sinister ... but when you hear Wright read his work aloud (which I'm glad I had the opportunity to do), the poems come across as wry and almost self-effacing.

[ril · Rating 3 out of 5]

A moving and difficult book to get through. A great collection to thrust anyone out of their comfort zone.
Musical.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Especially liked Scar Tissue II. Lots of meditating on memory, landscape and narrative, aging.