Jay Wright – författare

‘A profoundly original, ambitious and globally minded writer’ Rebecca Tamás, Guardian'A writer of serious intellectual depth' Jay BernardFor over half a century, Jay Wright’s poetry has been celebrated for its alertness to the multiplicity of human experience and identity. Wright’s inexorable lyric voice, whose gravitational pull has an ‘indelible music’, transforms life into myth, body into spirit, image into icon, and ritual into collective consciousness. Revelling in the rich interplay between Native American, African American, Latin American, European and West African cultural forms, Wright detangles the threads of these complex historical forces to present a tapestry of the Atlantic World and the people who move within it.Published for the first time in the UK, Transfigurations is the definitive volume that includes all of Wright’s 20th century poetry works - The Homecoming Singer (1971), Soothsayers and Omens (1976), Explications/Interpretations (1984), Dimensions of History (1976), The Double Invention of Komo (1980), Elaine's Book (1988), Boleros (1991), Transformations (1997).Transfigurations is a singular opportunity for readers to fully immerse themselves in the sublime imagination of one of the most profound, generous and innovative American poets of all time.'One of the handful of major American poets that we have alive among us' Harold Bloom

A collection of new and startlingly original essays from an acclaimed poet, essayist, and playwrightJay Wright is widely recognized as one of the most important American poets of the past half century. But in recent years, he has also written a series of unconventional essays that he calls “examination papers,” which he defines as “designated inquiries to myself.” In these linked essays, most of which resemble prose-poems, with only a few lines set on each page, Wright explores abiding artistic and philosophical concerns, including language, aesthetic form, knowledge, time, and death. Soul and Substance presents these pieces for the first time.Drawing on everything from African mythology to mathematical axioms, Wright reflects on a wide range of topics: the difficulties of defining and confronting death; the challenge of transcending one’s own consciousness; the nature of rhythm and the structure of space; and the relationship among the self, the body, and the material world. Throughout, the book examines the limits of human knowledge and the implications of our always imperfect understanding.Experimental and original, Soul and Substance is an important addition to the work of a major writer.

A collection of new and startlingly original essays from an acclaimed poet, essayist, and playwrightJay Wright is widely recognized as one of the most important American poets of the past half century. But in recent years, he has also written a series of unconventional essays that he calls “examination papers,” which he defines as “designated inquiries to myself.” In these linked essays, most of which resemble prose-poems, with only a few lines set on each page, Wright explores abiding artistic and philosophical concerns, including language, aesthetic form, knowledge, time, and death. Soul and Substance presents these pieces for the first time.Drawing on everything from African mythology to mathematical axioms, Wright reflects on a wide range of topics: the difficulties of defining and confronting death; the challenge of transcending one’s own consciousness; the nature of rhythm and the structure of space; and the relationship among the self, the body, and the material world. Throughout, the book examines the limits of human knowledge and the implications of our always imperfect understanding.Experimental and original, Soul and Substance is an important addition to the work of a major writer.

Few poets have as much to tell us about the intricate relationship between the African American past and present as Jay Wright. His poems weave a rich fabric of personal history using diverse materials drawn from African, Native American, and European sources. Scholarly, historical, intuitive, and emotional, his work explores territories in which rituals of psychological and spiritual individuation find a new synthesis in the construction of cultural values. Never an ideologue but always a poet of vision, his imagination shows us a way to rejoice and strengthen ourselves in our common humanity.Here, together for the first time, are Wright's previously published collections- The Homecoming Singer (1971), Soothsayers and Omens (1976), Explications/Interpretations (1984), Dimensions of History (1976), The Double Invention of Komo (1980), Elaine's Book (1988), and Boleros (1991)- along with the new poems of Transformations (1997). By presenting Wright's work as a whole, this collection reveals the powerful consistency of his theme- a spiritual or intellectual quest for personal development- as each book builds solidly upon the previous one.Wright examines history from a multicultural perspective, attempting to conquer a sense of exclusion- from society and his own cultural identity- and find solace and accord by linking American society to African traditions. He believes that a poem must articulate the vital rhythms of the culture it depicts and is dedicated to a pursuit of poetic forms that embody the cadence of African American culture.Defying characterization, Wright has experimented with voices, languages, cultures, and forms not normally associated with African American literature. He is well schooled in the cultures of West Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and- true to his New Mexican birth- he is a powerful synthesizer of human experience.Transfigurations reveals Wright to be a man of profound knowledge and a poet of exalted verbal intensity.

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 . . .”

A gift for his wife, Jay Wright’s Polynomials and Pollen explores the complementary exigencies of abstraction and physicality. In five sections, each arranged under the aegis of a tutelary concept—from the Yoruba, Akan, Bamana, and Náhuatl—the book is a constellation of protophilosophical inquiry into notions of order, disarray, evidence, flowering, and return; it is also a dynamically visceral work whose feelingtones register rage as well as devotion.