Daisy Fried Reviews C.D. Wright's The Poet, the Lion

It isn't the last collection of C.D. Wright's poetry, according to Copper Canyon Press, but it's the first since the poet's unexpected death last month. In her assessment, Fried considers the collection and remembers the poet.

Some critics of poetry are judges, separating good from bad. Some are kindergarten teachers, gentle in correction, indiscriminate in praise. Some delight in the takedown. Others love books you need them to explain. Some compose manifestoes, declaring the ends of stylistic eras. I myself hereby declare the era of declaring eras over is over.

Then there’s C. D. Wright. General readers might find this book recondite. We think of criticism as something utilitarian, probably dry. But this collection of prose fragments about poems, poets, poetics and politics reads like a journal of explorations and commitments. The fragments, as short as two lines and as long as nine pages, are culled from essays and lectures: outtakes remixed to appear at surprising angles. They are always smart, sometimes elliptical, frequently strange.

For example, Wright distributes seven fragments on the occasion of Robert Creeley’s death throughout the book. Wright herself died suddenly and unexpectedly last month, which makes reading these all the more shadowed, and luminous. As a single longer essay, “Hold Still, Lion!” was lovely. Here, revised, chopped up and interspersed with other subjects, “Hold Still, Lion!” allows readers to approach Creeley as Wright does, repeatedly, glancingly, as she lives and thinks of other things. “When I wrote to poet Rosmarie Waldrop (who was out of the country at the time), regarding Robert Creeley’s death, she responded, ‘It is the end of a world.’ ” Then white space for the rest of the page, so that reading Wright on Waldrop on Creeley, imagining long-distance shared loss between poets, becomes something like coming across an epitaph in a graveyard that arrests you with a sudden perception of death in life. Then you go on.

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