This volume, Wright's eleventh book of poetry, is a vivid, contemplative, far-reaching, yet wholly plain-spoken collection of moments appearing as lenses through which to see the world beyond our moments.Chickamaugais also a virtuoso exploration of the power of concision in lyric poetry--a testament to the flexible music of the long line Wright has made his own. As a reviewer inLibrary Journalnoted: "Wright is one of those rare and gifted poets who can turn thought into music. Following his self-prescribed regimen of purgatio, illuminato, and contemplatio, Wright spins one lovely lyric after another on such elemental subjects as sky, trees, birds, months, and seasons. But the real subject is the thinking process itself and the mysterious alchemy of language: 'The world is a language we never quite understand.'""In his generation, the generation of Ashbery, Rich, Ammons, Ginsberg, Plath, and Merrill, Wright is perhaps closest to Plath in his intensity of the image, closest to Ammons in his sense of the sidereal. But he sounds like nobody else, and he has remained faithful to insights and intuitions--of darkness as of light--less than common in contemporary America."--Helen Vendler,The New Republic "Chickamaugamarks a new turning point in Wright's career . . . Like [Wallace] Stevens'sThe Rock,Chickamaugais the result of a self-consciously imposed limitation . . . Most of Wright's new poems fit neatly on one page, and, if anything, each poem seems more gorgeous than the one preceding it . . . Wright's turn toward smaller poems is the result of a metaphysical as well as formal dilemma . . . [It] is a beautiful book, bearably human yet in touch with the sublime; I would not want to be deprived of any of its poems. But I can't help wondering what Charles Wright--who must be thought of as one of our living masters--could possibly do next."--James Longenbach,The Yale Review
Charles Wright received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1983 for "Country Music", the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1995 for "Chickamauga", & the Pulitzer Prize & National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 for "Black Zodiac".