A Short History of the Shadow (review)

Abstract

Perhaps our national culture lacks the wisdom that makes aging as venerable and bearable as it could be. Perhaps, too, those of us raised and living out our lives in the sub-nation ofAppalachia see aging more honestly, more symbolically, more tinged withbeauty. Kay Byer's new book would suggest— at least to this reviewer— how it may be so. This volume could easily be placed on the mantel beside the photo albums that we drag down when we want to see ourselves, without morbidity or self-righteousness, as we are and as we are becoming. —Ron Houchin Wright, Charles. A Short History of the Shadow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 81 pages. Hardcover. $20.00. A ShortHistoryofthe Shadow is Charles Wright's firstbook ofpoems since Appalachia (1998), the volume that completed his third "trilogy," Negative Blue (2000). His first trilogy, Country Music (1982), earned Wright the National Book Award in 1983. His second, The World ofthe Ten Thousand Things (1990), led to his receiving the 1993 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. For Black Zodiac (1997), one of the volumes in Negative Blue, Wright won a Pulitzer. He is thus, arguably, the most highly honored and widely recognized contemporary poet to grow up in southern Appalachia. 79 Wright's ties to this region—indeed, to the South as a whole—have often been obscured, however, by his long residence in California (where he taught at the University of California at Irvine from 1966 to 1983) and by his frequent use of Italian settings and subjects. It was while serving in the Army in Verona that he decided to become a poet; he also did graduate work at the University of Rome, was a Fulbright lecturer in Venice, and published translations ofboth Eugenio Montale and Dino Campana, the former winning a PEN Translation Award. Wright's poems are also filled with references to Chinese poets and their landscapes and to the Montana countryside where he has spent many summers. What most—though not all—of these settings have in common with southern Appalachia is their mountain landscape. The same is true of Wright's "back yard" in Charlottesville, the setting of many of his poems since 1983 (when he began teaching at the University of Virginia), for its backdrop is the Blue Ridge Mountains. In various interviews and essays Wright has emphasized the importance of his roots in east Tennessee and western North Carolina, that influence being most notable, perhaps, in his sensitivity to landscape and his persistent religious concerns. Wright has said, in fact, that his three principal subjects are language, landscape, and the idea of God. To that triad one ought to add mortality, a subject that has haunted Wright since the beginning of his career and that has become increasingly prominent as the poet (born in 1935) reaches his mid 60's. All four of these subjects are readily apparent in A Short History of the Shadow. The shadow of the title is a multifaceted symbol, suggestive of time and death, of materiality, of the body itself ("the shadow of flesh," as one poem puts it), and of Platonic and Neo-Platonic conceptions of this world as a mere shadow of the realm of Ideal Forms. In some ways this book— like Appalachia, with its repeated references to Wright's imagined Appalachian Book of the Dead—represents a descent into the psalmist's valley of the shadow of death; yet possessing a shadow, seeing one's shadow, means that one is still alive, however tenuous the individual's hold on life may be. Thus in one poem Wright states, "shadows, like angels, lie at the feet of all things," his simile giving a positive connotation to the word "shadows." But the book's title, with its single adjective "short," attests to the brevity of human existence, not just to the brevity of the poet's account of that existence. The poems in this collection have internal dates ranging from March 1998 to April 2001, and their seasonal progression is crucial to the mood of affirmation they convey. Wright divides the book into five 80 parts, each separately titled. The first, "LookingAround," and the last, "Body and Soul...