Böcker av Robert Wrigley

Nemerov's Door is a testament to what matters most in Robert Wrigley's life: love, nature, wild country, music, and poetry. In his youth, Robert Wrigley had little interest in poetry; you even could call it an active disinterest. Then, at the age of twenty-one, after being drafted into the army during the Vietnam War, after receiving an honorable discharge on the grounds of conscientious objection, and feeling otherwise adrift, he took a class in poetry writing, and that class altered the trajectory of his life. Nemerov's Door is the story of a distinguished and widely celebrated poet's development, via episodes from his life, and via his examinations of some of the poets whose work has helped to shape his own. Essays on James Dickey, Richard Hugo, Etheridge Knight, Howard Nemerov, Sylvia Plath, and Edwin Arlington Robinson are interwoven with essays about the sources of poetry: arrowheads; wild rivers; and the lyrics of a song from My Fair Lady, among other things. In the essay about Richard Hugo, Wrigley engages with a single poem by his great mentor, whose influence on Wrigley and many other poets of his generation has been enormous. "The Music of Sense" extrapolates from Frost's notion of the "sound of sense," and fuses it with Hugo's notion that the poet, forced to choose between music and meaning, must always choose music. As though to offer his own proof of that notion, one of Wrigley's other essays here is a poem. In all, the book, described by Joe Wilkins of the High Desert Journal, "is as generous and wise a book as I've read in a long, long time."

Described by the late James Dickey as "one of the finest new poets to come along in years," Robert Wrigley fulfills that early promise with this, his newest collection. Reign of Snakes is a book about desire, the soul's desire as much as the body's. As Jane Hirshfield said of Wrigley's previous book, In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995), "To read it is to unpeel a little further into the human, and into the wideness that holds the human--a splendid gift." Reign of Snakes takes us to yet another level, deep into the daily devotions, "where the dark blows a kiss to night.". . . a frigid day in February and a full-grownrattlesnake curled to a comma in the middle of the middle of the just-plowed road. Ice ghost, I think, curve of rock or stubbed-off branch. But the diamonds are there, under a dust of crystals looming, impossible, summer's tattoo, the mythical argyle of evil. --from "Reign of Snakes"

Robert Wrigley is a poet of America's northern Rocky Mountains. Over three decades his poetry's pervading concerns have been rural Western landscapes and humankind's place within the natural world. This is the first UK edition of his poetry. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

Two of Wrigley's finest collections of poems are now together in one volume.