This updating of our previous title, The Point Where All Things Meet, which Tom Andrews edited in 1994, selects from the contents of that earlier book and adds many new essays that have appeared in the interim. The result is a complex and generous survey of Charles Wright’s "trilogy of trilogies," the sweeping project encompassed in the selected volumes comprised by Country Music (1982), The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990), and Negative Blue (2000).
Table of Contents
Introduction • REVIEWS • Charles Wright’s Country Music (1991) — David St. John • from “One for the Rose and The Southern Cross” (1982) — David Walker • from “Lives in a Rearview Mirror” (1984) — David Kalstone • from “The Trace of a Story Line” — Mark Jarman • from “The Pragmatic Imagination and Secret of Poetry” (1988) — Mark Jarman • Travels in Time (1998) — Helen Vendler • Zone Journals (1991) — Sherod Santos • from “An Elegist’s New England, a Buddhist’s Dante” (1991) — Richard Tillinghast • The Blood Bees of Paradise (1991) — David Young • Improvisations on Charles Wright’s The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1992) — Tom Andrews • Charles Wright’s Hymn (1991) — Christopher Buckley • The Nothing That Is (1995) — Helen Vendler • from “On Restraint” — David Baker • from “Earned Weight” — James Longenbach • Between Heaven and Earth (1999) — Adam Kirsch • Ars Longa (1999) — J. D. McClatchy • An Enchanted, Diminished World (2000) — Ron Smith • ESSAYS • The Transcendent “I” (1979) — Helen Vendler • Tracing Charles Wright — Calvin Bedient • Under the Sign of the Cross (1989) — J. D. McClatcy • “Things that Lock Our Wrists to the Past”: Self-Portraiture and Autobiography in Charles Wright’s Poetry (1989) — James McCorkle • Gospel Music: Charles Wright and the High Lonesome (1992) — Michael Chitwood • Charles Wright and Presences in Absence (1994) — Julian Gitzen • The Capabilities of Charles Wright (1992) — Stephen Cushman • Metaphysics of the Image in Charles Wright and Paul Césanne(1994) — Bruce Bond • Resurrecting the Baroque (1997) — Peter Stitt • The Doubting Penitent: Charles Wright’s Epiphanies of Abandonment (1998) — Lee Upton • Poetic Standard Time: The Zones of Charles Wright (1998) — Christopher R. Miller • Chrles Wright, Giorgio Morandi, and the Metaphysics of the Line (2002) — Bonnie Costello • Charles Wright’s Via Mystica (2004) — Henry Hart • Charles Wright and “The Metapysics of the Quotidian” (2005) — Willard Spiegelman • Bibliography • Contributors • Acknowledgments