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- The Branch Will Not Break
A new book of poetry from a Pulitzer Prize-winning master poet
These new poems by the author of Saint Judas and The Green Wall embody a sharp break with his earlier work. Their impact is well described by the British critic Michael Hamburger: "He has absorbed the work of modern Spanish and other continental poets and evolved a medium of his own. This medium dispenses with argument and rhetoric, and presents the pure substance of poetry, images which are 'the objective correlatives' of emotion and feeling. It is only in the new collection that Wright has found this wholly distinctive voice."
Mr. Wright is well known for his previous books and his contributions to virtually every literary journal of importance. His numerous honors include a Fullbright fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowship, and many other prizes and awards.
As I Step Over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor • Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium • In Fear of Harvests • Three Stanzas From Goethe • Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio • Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota • The Jewel • In the Face of Hatred • Fear Is What Quickens Me • A Message Hidden in an Empty Wine Bottle That I Threw into a Cully of Maple Trees One Night at an Indecent Hour • Stages on a Journey Westward • How My Fever Left • Miners • In Ohio • Two Poems About President Harding • Eisenhower's Visit to Franco, 1959 • In Memory of a Spanish Poet • The Undermining of the Defense Economy • Twilights • Two Hangovers • Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me • Two Horses Playing in the Orchard • By a Lake in Minnesota • Beginning • From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower • March • Trying to Pray • Two Spring Charms • Spring Images • Arriving in the Country Again • In the Cold House • Snowstorm in the Midwest • Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas, 1960 • American Wedding • A Prayer to Escape From the Market Place • Rain • Today I Was Happy, So I Made this Poem • Mary Bly • To the Evening Star: Central Minnesota • I Was Afraid of Dying • A Blessing • Milkweed • A Dream of Burial
JAMES WRIGHT was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, in 1927. He was well known for his translations of such Spanish poets as Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo and for his poems about the Midwest. He received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1972 for his Collected Poems. Other books of his published by Wesleyan are Saint Judas, Shall We Gather at the River, and Above the River: The Complete Poems (co published with Farrar, Straus and Giroux). James Wright died on March 26, 1980, at the age of 52.
"These poems are splendidly direct, magnificently simple; sometimes the phrasing is so elegantly obvious that the heart jumps at it...This is a book which ought to be read at least three times, and then maybe once a month for as long as one lives. The first three readings are essential, if the reader is going to get much from these poems; they seem to make so few demands, they look so obvious, they are so subtle."
~Hal Smith, Epoch
""I like the force here, the clarity and directness, the language bound intimately with idea and image; and the harshness, the precision, the sense of fitness and place for every syllable.""
~Harry Strickhausen, Poetry
""These poems are splendidly direct, magnificently simple; sometimes the phrasing is so elegantly obvious that the heart jumps at itThis is a book which ought to be read at least three times, and then maybe once a month for as long as one lives. The first three readings are essential, if the reader is going to get much from these poems; they seem to make so few demands, they look so obvious, they are so subtle.""
~Hal Smith, Epoch
""His is a world haunted by the past and apprehensive of the future. It is, symbolically, the world of contemporary experience.""
~Gene Baro, The New York Times Book Review
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