Wright, C: Caribou

A powerfully moving meditation on life and the beyond, from one of our finest American poetsCharles 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. This is an elegy to transient beauty, a song for the "stepchild hour, / belonging to neither the light nor dark, / The hour of disappearing things," and an expression of Wright's restless questing for a reality beyond the one before our eyes ("We are all going into a world of dark . . . It's okay. That's where the secrets are, / The big ones, the ones too tall to tell"). Caribou's strength is in its quiet, wry 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; Caribou is another remarkable gift from the poet around whose influence "the whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, slow circle" (Poetry).