High Lonesome

Edited by Adam Giannelli

Oberlin College Press, 2006

Field Editions

This collection of essays (which updates The Point Where All Things Meet, edited by Tom Andrews) offers a complex and generous survey of Charles Wright’s “trilogy of trilogies,” the sweeping project encompassed in the selected volumes comprised by Country Music (1982), The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990), and Negative Blue (2000). Containing selected reviews and essays that cover larger areas of Wright’s work, the book examines the scope and achievement of Wright’s thirty-year project, with contributions by David Kalstone, James Longenbach, J. D. McClatchy, Lee Upton, and Helen Vender, among others.

Praise

”Giannelli has done readers a great service in gathering these pieces and by including a brief biography of Wright as well as a thorough bibliography of primary and secondary sources.”

—David Garrison, South Atlantic Review

“The reviews and essays contained here will continue to be germane not only because they are pioneer but because, with a few exceptional passages, they make strong contribution to the ineffable allurement of the poetry of Charles Wright. Even if High Lonesome were a bad book, it would still be a valuable volume. It is almost a bonus that it is so good.”

—Fred Chappell, Appalachian Heritage

“Though many are short, these are more than mere reviews, intimately embracing the particularities (and singularities, “naked” or otherwise—to those of you of the physics persuasion) of various Wright volumes. Then there are also several full-blown essays (most exploring themes, obsessions, and influences on the poet’s oeuvre). All are a delight and an education; twice so in that many of the pieces are written by poets (such as Richard Tillinghast, David St. John, Carol Muske-Dukes, etc.)—so one is treated to the thought processes and theories of two poets at once.”

—The Iconoclast