The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All

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. Wright, who received a MacArthur Fellowship and many other prizes over a career comprising more than a dozen works of poetry and prose, was best known for projects that fused journalism and poetry. For "One Big Self," with photographs by Deborah Luster, she interviewed inmates at three Louisiana prisons, then interspersed their voices with prison data, inmate correspondence and inventories. The introduction to that sobering, vibrant book is one of a few essays reprinted here without chopping or remixing. From it we understand Wright to be a writer of ethical conscience and rigorous honesty, as she concerns herself with her position as a free woman making art of prisoners' suffering: "Try to remember it the way it was. Try to remember what I wore when I visited the prisoners. Trying to remember how tall was my boy then. What books I was teaching. Trying to remember how I hoped to add one true and lonely word to the host of texts that bear upon incarceration." The five paragraphs entitled "Nuptials & Violence" also deal with lived rather than literary experience. A description of the bride's unusual dress ("lined with drapery fabric ... worn inside out"), wedding location ("the twin staircase of a wiped-out Katrina house") and revelers dancing with "armpits going all goaty" segues to a reminder of the outside world: "stinkdamp. ... Heavily armed men began to troll the streets behind the tinted windows of SUVs ... but between Arts and Music only kissing occurred under a full, howling NOLA moon, clouds copulating with abandon." The bride was Wright's collaborator on "One Big Self." Things here fit together even as they fragment. This book is partially a portrait of America. Wright was nothing if not serious-minded. She was also witty. In "Concerning Why Poetry Offers a Better Deal Than the World's Biggest Retailer," she writes about Walmart and poetry: "Step onto the back of your shiny cart and take a roll down Action Alley. You need never run out of the things you never knew you wanted. ... And herein lies Walmart's great advantage: ever growing. And herein lies poetry's endurance: determination at the core." Which do you prefer? DAISY FRIED is the author of three books of poems, most recently "Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice."

Wright's 15th book and second collection of prose poetry/lyric essays (after 2005's Cooling Time) further reveals her particular Southern wit, engagement with art, and commitment to social justice. Four major recurring themes unite the collection: Wright's various journeys at home and abroad, her lifelong engagement with her contemporaries (including Brenda Hillman and Forrest Gander), her constant search for and redefining of poetry itself, and her love for Robert Creeley and William Carlos Williams. Wright deftly interweaves her wide-ranging pursuits into something remarkably cohesive, demonstrating a willingness to tackle any subject and bring it into the fold. "As with most scientific papers, silence may be all that is at the other end," she writes of poetry. "Maybe silence itself has a value beyond being humbling. Maybe the record being made is its primary worth, and the rest of our temporal span is meant just for living and the attention it commands." In one of many passages dedicated to Williams's Spring & All, she writes, "his apostrophe was to the future, but he hankered for contact here and now. The charge of his writing was change." The same could be said about Wright. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.