Transfigurations

Reviews / Votes

Finally, British readers can get to grips with a profoundly original, ambitious and globally minded writer. Wright's lyrical, experimental verse traverses world traditions and beliefs, mining the heritage of his African ancestry alongside the influence of an upbringing in the American southwest, a fulcrum of American, Spanish and Navajo cultures. The poems offer a deep engagement with spiritual knowledge and myth... They also explore the vigour of ritual, and how it might lead to personal and communal transformation... Despite their variety, these dazzling, questing poems are always seeking to discover how a collective selfhood and identity might come into being -- Rebecca Tamas * Guardian * In Transfigurations Wright concentrates intensely the eruptive, tragic dimensions of history and nature, myth and metaphysics, the daemonic and violent shocks of life. The eight books that make up Transfigurations are contemporary classics. Together they form a rare monumental, sensuous force unlike anything else on either side of the Atlantic -- Ishion Hutchinson Wright's collected work reveals a writer of serious intellectual depth, whose humanistic blend of multilingualism, African cosmology, and meditations on history, shows us how to think in a time marked by confusion and decline. Future scholars will marvel at how such poetry was championed and given its due when everywhere the subtle insights of the arts and humanities are under attack. This will be testament to both Wright's vision and the inspired community that labours to read, publish and preserve it for a hopeful future -- Jay Bernard, author of <i> Surge </i> One of the most innovative and visionary poets in the American and African-American traditions... [Transfigurations] synthesises Wright's philosophical and transcultural explorations with a dazzling and indelible linguistic music -- John Keene, author of <i> Counternarratives </i> A substantial collection of work. [Wright's] forcefully musical rhythms drive even poems of everyday experience-such as waiting outside church on a warm night-to a pleasingly contradictory transport. And the later, meditative poems are bound to the world by their attention to the sensual within the spiritual * The New Yorker * Jay Wright is a brilliant and original poet... beating his own unpredictable path through a variety of terrains -- John Hollander * The New York Times * An astonishing New World epic...of human transfiguration and transformation, of nothing less than the great work of art that is 'our life among ourselves' -- Steven Meyer * Boston Review *