Like Something Flying Backwards
New and Selected Poems
Published on 27. April 2007
Book
Paperback/Softback
320 pages
978-1-85224-762-1 (ISBN)
Description
C.D. Wright's work is enormously varied: she was an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvented herself with each new volume. Much of her poetry is rooted in the landscape and people of her childhood in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. Long admired for the honed ferocity of her vision, she wrote with a distinctive Southern accent and a cinematic eye, cut with a secular wit that only slightly tempers her exigency. The resulting poems are hypnotic documentaries that offer what she called 'a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning'. Like Something Flying Backwards was the first UK edition of her work, and presents a wide range of her lyrics, narratives, prose poems and odes. Based on Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (2003), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, its selection was expanded to include more later work as well as new poems not then published in book form in the US, and the complete text of her book-length poem, Deepstep Come Shining.
Reviews / Votes
'Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle, which she uses to evoke the haunted quality of our carnal existence' - The New Yorker 'One of the most complex, fascinating and ultimately rewarding American poets writing today... For her, it seems a natural step from Southern down-home dialect (at least as her writer's ear perceived it) to the experiments with nonsyntactical language that put her in the forefront of experimental poetry. Not only do her poems explore uncharted ground in both subject and form, each new volume seems to take new risks' - Library JournalMore details
Edition
International
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 241 mm
Width: 176 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
670 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-762-1 (9781852247621)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
C.D. Wright (1949-2016) published many books of poetry and prose, including two book-length poems, Deepstep Come Shining (1998) and Just Whistle (1993); Cooling Time (2005), a book comprised of poetry, memoir and essay; and One with Others (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2013), both a book-length poem and a work of investigative journalism. Her first UK retrospective, Like Something Flying Backwards: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), was expanded from Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2003), including a substantial number of the poems from her Griffin International Prize-winning collection Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). Her book of 'prosimetrical essays', The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, was published by Copper Canyon a few days before her totally unexpected death in January 2016. Her many honours included a Lannan Literary Award, a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship and the $50,000 2009 Griffin International Poetry Prize for Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). She was a professor of English at Brown University, and edited Lost Roads Publishers for 30 years with her husband, poet Forrest Gander. She collaborated on many projects with photographer Deborah Luster, most recently One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003/2007). She was State Poet of Rhode Island from 1995 to 1999.