New Books

Copper Canyon Press / 97 pages

C. D. Wright’s thirteenth volume of poetry is generously proportioned—its broad pages allow room for her expansive lines to remain unbroken—and generous in scope as well. Her poems, which vary in form from the simple lyric to prose paragraphs, deliver a “pungent cargo” of subjects, many of which share space in the same work. Concern for a wayward son, an ailing friend, the war in Iraq, are all at once rising, falling, hovering.

“If you give your fears a shape,” Wright quotes her friend, “you break free of them.” Yet the many shapes Wright gives to fear in this volume show her skepticism of such easy advice—“This was before the bad diagnosis,” she admits. The practice of shape-giving, the effort to give voice and form to thought in verse, begins to feel little different from the “nonstop” worrying that fills her days and poems once she makes the “nonstop terrifying” discovery that “Poetry / Doesn’t / Protect / You / Anymore.” Blunt truth-telling, close observation, a refusal of the “all-American forgettery” of our mediated lives, are nonetheless Wright’s salvation—or the route she will take to get there. “We burn to make one another sing,” she writes. Maybe the desire to make art is enough. Certainly when that desire is lost, all is lost—and that bleak possibility keeps Wright singing.

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