New Titles in Poetry

Littlefoot
Author: Charles Wright
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Cloth $23.00 (104 p.)
ISBN: 0374189668
ISBN-13: 9781597320160
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Gold and gold again in Littlefoot, the latest from Charles Wright, as in poems worth their weight in, and also, interestingly, in references to gold (the color) running like a vein through the collection. The effect of this repetition is of glint rather than shine, as of daylight moving across a landscape viewed from far away and for a long time, inspiring (whatever one's beliefs or lack of them) images celestial; if not wings and gates, at least some intimations of immortality. The poems are themselves a landscape, one in which Wright sees or posits the visionary gleam, and where the glory and the dream are ever-present, whatever the outward or inward climate in which they are found. Wright's ability to focus up close and draw back wide and far in a flash is breathtaking, but it is the long perspective that stirs the reader most.

Why Littlefoot and not Monte? There were, after all, two horses named here, with the name of one seemingly chosen for the title of the work. The choice is of a kind with the book's white cover and the numbering, not naming, of the poems. There is a reference to Bigfoot, a name Wright gives the north wind, that speaks to this. Perhaps Littlefoot is its counterpoint, a wind that could be called a "Breeze like a limp hand/Just stirring the long-haired grasses, then letting them be." Wright is preferring the quiet to the loud, and the still to the busy, "…stillness being the metaphor / Out of which every grain is revealed…." in this series of meditations that is all one meditation on living completely present to the present while coming to grips with mortality. The conclusions Wright reaches are not comforting, but they are graceful, and reading them is a refreshment for the soul.