Caribou: Poems
Wright has published more than 20 volumes  of poetry, nonfiction, and translations, and his awards include a Pulitzer, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Book Award, and the Bollingen and Griffin prizes. The lyrics in his latest collection are short, fluent. The images are elegant, and the manner of address is mellow as he uses “dude,” “man,” and “boy” as intensifiers. The only sequence is titled “Chinoiserie,” though to call it a sequence suggests too strong a relationship between poems linked only by sensibility. This is not a flaw. The book has no flaws, which is to say it fulfills the criteria it sets for itself. The poems instruct us in how to read them. Wright acknowledges his debt to Chinese poetry, and in the images of mountains, sunrise and sunset, the coursing  of rivers, the sounds and startling appearance of birds, lengthening shadows, the “Cloud deck assembling its puzzle pieces together / One by one,” change is all, change that ends in changelessness. --Michael Autrey