Caribou: Poems
About this book
A powerfully moving meditation on life, nature, and the beyond, from one of our finest American poetsThis is an old man’s poetry, written by someone who’s spent his lifeLooking for one truth.Sorry, pal, there isn’t one. —from “Ancient of Days”Charles Wright’s truth—the truth of nature, of man’s yearning for the divine, of aging—is at the heart of the renowned poet’s latest collection, Caribou. At once an elegy to simple beauty (a sunset the same color as the maple tree in his neighbor’s yard, “Nature and nature head-butt”) and an expression of Wright’s restless questing for a reality beyond the one before our eyes (“Between the divine and the divine / lives a lavish shadow. / Do we avoid it or stand in it? / Do we gather the darkness around us, / or do we let it slide by?”), Caribou’s strength is in its quiet, subtle profundity. “It’s good to be here,” Wright tells us. “It’s good to be where the world’s quiescent, and reminiscent.” And to be here—in the pages of this stirring collection—is more than good; it’s another remarkable gift from the poet around whose influence “the whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, slow circle” (Poetry).