Thursday at Zenda. Thursday of Poetry. Thursday, in this case, devoted to Poetry — 1, the first of the four volumes that the publishing house Vaso Roto plans to assemble, for the first time in Spanish — and translated by Adalber Salas — the complete works of the American poet Charles Wright (Tennessee, 1935), a figure essential to the recent history of English-language lyric poetry. Heir to the premises of the modernist tradition — with Pound or Wallace Stevens as living presences in his writing — Wright has developed a poetry of enormous dimension, both in breadth and in depth.
The publishing house itself notes, with regard to the author and the book: “The complete works of Charles Wright, gathered for the first time in Spanish in four volumes, constitutes one of the most notable and coherent poetic projects in contemporary North American literature.
Across more than five decades, his writing has developed a singular form of thought in which tradition and modernity are constantly intertwined
: from the heritage of poets such as Walt Whitman or Ezra Pound to the assimilation of Oriental and European lyric poetry. In this crossing of influences, Wright has built a voice of his own, recognizable for its attention to what, in experience, resists being fixed.
This first volume, which gathers his early poetry, allows us to witness the emergence of that voice in close relation to the landscape of the southern United States, turned here into an evident structure of knowledge. Far from functioning as mere backdrop, that territory shapes a kind of secular mysticism where the visible opens to a meditative dimension. In these poems, time does not impose itself as rupture, but as sediment; memory does not reconstruct, but interrogates; and the spiritual appears not as certainty, but as a diffuse presence, almost imperceptible, inscribed in the everyday”.
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Author: Charles Wright. Translation: Adalber Salas Hernández. Title: Poetry 1. Publisher: Vaso Roto. Purchase: Todos tus libros.