Charles Wright, Caribou

Charles Wright, Caribou
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2014
© 2014 Charles Wright
ISBN 978-0-372-53515-5

I don’t write much about poetry, although I read quite a bit.  I find writing about poetry difficult.  What I want to do is what J.D. Salinger has Buddy Glass say to us in “Seymour: An Introduction:”

The only rational thing to do at this point would be to plunk down one, two, or all one hundred and eighty-four of the poems for the reader to see for himself.

But, of course, like Buddy, I can’t, in my case because the copyright lawyers would jump all over me if I were to type out the fifty-five poems in this collection.  I will quote, sparingly, from several of them, in the hopes that you won’t feel that you should just take my word for their quality.

Charles Wright is probably my favorite poet (although the competition is stiff); he is, at any rate one of the best American poets since World War II.  He is, as of this month, 83 years old, retired from the University of Virginia.  He is the author of eighteen books of poetry, not counting the five volumes of poems selected during various periods of his work.  I have read a lot, but not all of that, and have been uplifted, provoked, enlightened, and moved by much of it.  His writing is colloquial, seemingly devoid of artifice (which is an art in itself.  He draws your attention to his influences in the titles (and dedications of some of the poems (he has, for example, a love of classical Chinese and Japanese poetry.

Caribou is a difficult book, not because the poems are abstract or abstruse, because they are not.  Not because their quality is lacking—these poems moved me, and I hope they will move you.  These are difficult poems, because what Wright has written is a set of elegies, as he knows that his time with us is drawing to a close.  But they are not sad or bitter; they rather celebrate what as gone before and the mystery of what will come next.

As I read the poems in Caribou, I bookmarked the ones that seemed to resonate the most with me (mere stripling at 70).  In “Natura Morta,” he reminds us that

All life, as someone might offer
                                                 rises out of death
And longs to return to it.
It’s in that that longing for our days to shine out,
                                                 and glow forth,

And are our comfort into the dark.

Or the lesson of “Shadow and Smoke:”

Live your life as though you were already dead
                                                             Che Guevara declared.

Okay, let’s see how that works.
Not much difference, a far as I can see,
                                                the earth the same Paradise

It’s always wanted to be,
Heaven as far away as before,
The clouds the same old moveable gates since time began.

There is no circle, there is no sentiment to be broken.
There are only the songs of young men,
                                                        and the songs of old men

Hoping for something elsewise,
Disabuse them in their ignorance,
Lord,

       Tell them the shadows are already gone, the smoke
Already cleared,
                           tell them that light is never a metaphor.

Or, perhaps the shortest poem in the book:

                 “THINGS HAVE ENDS AND BEGINNINGS”

Cloud mountains rise over mountain range.
Silence and quietness,
                                  sky bright as water, sky bright as lake water
Grace is the instinct for knowing when to stop.  And where.

(I, for one, can feel the influence of Chinese poets in that one.)

Again, I see these poems as elegies, but not poems of sorrow.  They are as much celebrations of a life lived of his own terms as anything else.  I hope at least some of you will be moved so seek this book out, take it into your life, and be warmed by it.