Almost thirty years ago, Charles Wright (who teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry) began a poetic project of astonishing scope—a series of three trilogies. The first trilogy was collected in
Country Music
, the second in
The World of the Ten Thousand Things
, and the third began with
Chickamauga
and continued with
Black Zodiac
.
Appalachia
is the last book in the final trilogy of this pathbreaking and majestic series.
If
traced "Wright's journey from the soil to the stars" and
"lovingly detailed" our world and made "a visionary map of the world beyond" (James Longenbach,
The Nation
), this final book in Wright's great work reveals a master's confrontation with his own mortality and his stunning ability to discover transcendence in the most beautifully ordinary of landscapes.