Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems Book

One of his generation's most accomplished poets, Robert Wrigley is renowned for his ironic, powerful, and lucid style as well as his ability to fuse narrative and lyrical impulses. Earthly Meditations features nineteen original poems alongside a collection of sixty-one poems chosen from his first six books.

Publishers Weekly

Wrigley (Lives of the Animals, 2003) has been offering up well-crafted, articulate and largely autobiographical free verse since the 1970s, often reflecting his Great Plains roots or his longtime residence among the woods of northern Idaho. This ample career-spanning selection shows how little the essence of his carefully wrought poems appears to have changed: the notion that "the body's one life, constant, expansive, simultaneous" informs all his observations and invocations, cast, often, into sinuously subordinated, easy-to-follow sentences. Wrigley's personality remains a granite constant even as his attention wanders from the distant past to the near future, from his parents to cottonmouth snakes, from a confident mare in spring to a "Sad Moose": "Each day for a week I've watched him,/ the ribs defined into claws." Wrigley's quiet respect for nonhuman nature and his consistent interest in the meaning of sex, paternity and literary inheritance unify his detailed and trustworthy, if rarely pyrotechnic, work, in which "Living is a slow dance you know/ you're dreaming, but the chill at your neck/ is real." (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.