Negative blue : selected later poems

When Charles Wright published Appalachia in 1998, it marked the completion of a nine-volume project, of which James Longen-bach wrote in the Boston Review, "Wright's trilogy of trilogies -- call it 'The Appalachian Book of the Dead' -- is sure to be counted among the great long poems of the century". The first two of those trilogies were collected in Country Music (1982) and The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990). Negative Blue adds to his third trilogy (Chickamauga [1995], Black Zodiac [1997], and Appalachia [1998]) a section of new poems that suggests new directions in the work of this sensuous, spirit-haunted poet. It is, as Dionisio D. Martinez wrote in The Miami Herald, "truly an event".