J. Peter Moore Places Jay Wright's New Collection Among the Full Corpus

J. Peter Moore reviews The Prime Anniversary (Flood Editions), Jay Wright's newest book, for Hyperallergic. "The book is the latest installment in Wright’s ongoing effort to write a poetry of ideas, wherein matter takes on ritual proportions and Afro-Caribbean ritual thought responds to the exclusionary history of Western rationalism," writes Moore. More:

...His corpus is a formalist fantasia the way most rituals are. Every aspect of the page — layout, typography, illustration, tense, sound, and symbol — holds value in the divination process. To read Wright is to adopt the position, often thematized in his work, of the “postulant, trembling into knowledge of God’s body, knowledge of his naming” (Transfigurations 148). But if Wright’s reader is a candidate seeking entrance into a rarified order, it is an ecumenical one, diasporic in scope. The name of the absolute is not written in the language of any single denomination or intellectual province. It is scrawled in a host of esoteric tongues—tribal icon, variable equation, philosophical abstraction—making the name less a stable thing and more an echo of entangled ideology.

Within this corpus one finds all the clear markings of phone-number chunking. There is the early, narrative-driven work of The Homecoming Singer (1971), the mature eight-book cycle collected in Transfigurations: Collected Poems (2000), and the prolific late-career output — five books following Transfigurations. (Surely a collected late poems is in the works.) The premise for The Prime Anniversary is laid out in the preceding volume, Disorientations: Groundings (2013). There, we find Wright adopting the familiar posture of the late poet: “I ask you now to consider the old poet / as he sits in his Bradford garden” (6). From this vantage, the venerable poet of Vermont takes stock...

Find the complete review right here.