Product Description

The Presentable Art of Reading Absence takes as impulse the act of meditation, in which the energetic relationship between a meditative body and its universe is not only the envisioning of absence by presence but also vision itself: "Here begins the revelation of a kiosk." With occult emotionality and analytic brilliance, Jay Wright has written the user's guide to evanescence: "I have become attuned / to the disappearance of all things / and of my self . . ."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1550417 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 88 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781564784988
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Booklist
In The Presentable Art of Reading Absence, Wright sets forth on a “pilgrimage, / a secular mourning, / a morning given over to mediation.” And so begins a book-length poem, an improvised “movement beyond anxiety,” a study in breath and landscape, a reading of the habits of birds and the limits of physics. Here is a pushing away of thought, an embrace of silence, and “the inexact profession / of a pilgrim proceeding / toward the point of his own / erasure.” The natural world is present in all its particular glory as the meditating pilgrim, mediating between human awareness and the rest of life, strives for stillness. Threads of Spanish and playlike scenes contribute to Wright’s mathematics of consciousness, his exquisite and affecting calculations without solutions, his dream of continuity and circularity. --Donna Seaman

Review
"Jay Wright is a brilliant and original poet, difficult and allusive, beating his own unpredictable path through a variety of terrains." --John Hollander, New York Times

"Jay Wright is one of the five or six living American poets whose work will survive." --Harold Bloom

"Wright invites us to roam the cultures of the transatlantic world, to speak and know many tongues, to partake of the rituals through which we may be initiated into modes of individual and communal enhancement. In yet another age of great uncertainty, Wright enables us to imagine that breaking the vessels of the past is more an act of uncovering than of sheer destruction, and that we need not necessarily choose between an intellectual and a spiritual life, for both can still be had." --Robert B. Stepto

About the Author
Jay Wright—poet, essayist, playwright—was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1934. He has been the recipient of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship, the Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, and the 1996 Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Most recently, Wright was named the 2005 recipient of Yale University's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. He lives in Bradford, Vermont.