Oblivion Banjo: The Poetry of Charles Wright

The selected works of one of our finest American poets

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.
--from "Scar Tissue"

Over the course of his work--more than twenty books in total--Charles Wright has built "one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century" (David Young, Contemporary Poets). Oblivion Banjo, a capacious new selection spanning his decades-long career, showcases the central themes of Wright's poetry: "language, landscape, and the idea of God." No matter the precise subject of each poem, on display here is a vast and rich interior life, a mind wrestling with the tenuous relationship between the ways we describe the world and its reality.

The recipient of almost every honor in poetry--the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, to name a few--and a former poet laureate of the United States, Wright is an essential voice in American letters. Oblivion Banjo is the perfect distillation of his inimitable career--for devout fans and newcomers alike.