Transfigurations: Collected Poems(Penguin Modern Classics)

‘A profoundly original, ambitious and globally minded writer… these dazzling, questing poems are always seeking to discover how a collective selfhood and identity might come into being’ Rebecca Tamás, Guardian 'A writer of serious intellectual depth' Jay Bernard ‘The greatest living American poet’ Dante Micheaux For over half a century, Jay Wright’s poetry has been celebrated for its alertness to the multiplicity of human experience and identity. Wright’s inexorable lyric voice, whose gravitational pull has an ‘indelible music’, transforms life into myth, body into spirit, image into icon, and ritual into collective consciousness. Revelling in the rich interplay between Native American, African American, Latin American, European and West African cultural forms, Wright detangles the threads of these complex historical forces to present a tapestry of the Atlantic World and the people who move within it. Published for the first time in the UK, Transfigurations is the definitive volume that includes all of Wright’s 20th century poetry works - The Homecoming Singer (1971), Soothsayers and Omens (1976), Explications/Interpretations (1984), Dimensions of History (1976), The Double Invention of Komo (1980), Elaine's Book (1988), Boleros (1991), Transformations (1997). Transfigurations is a singular opportunity for readers to fully immerse themselves in the sublime imagination of one of the most profound, generous and innovative American poets of all time.

About the Author :
Jay Wright is a poet and playwright. He has received numerous awards, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Lifetime achievement, the L.L Winship/PEN Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 62nd Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. A MacArthur Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Wright lives in Vermont.

Review :
Finally, British readers can get to grips with a profoundly original, ambitious and globally minded writer. Wright’s lyrical, experimental verse traverses world traditions and beliefs, mining the heritage of his African ancestry alongside the influence of an upbringing in the American southwest, a fulcrum of American, Spanish and Navajo cultures. The poems offer a deep engagement with spiritual knowledge and myth... They also explore the vigour of ritual, and how it might lead to personal and communal transformation... Despite their variety, these dazzling, questing poems are always seeking to discover how a collective selfhood and identity might come into being In Transfigurations Wright concentrates intensely the eruptive, tragic dimensions of history and nature, myth and metaphysics, the daemonic and violent shocks of life. The eight books that make up Transfigurations are contemporary classics. Together they form a rare monumental, sensuous force unlike anything else on either side of the Atlantic Wright’s collected work reveals a writer of serious intellectual depth, whose humanistic blend of multilingualism, African cosmology, and meditations on history, shows us how to think in a time marked by confusion and decline. Future scholars will marvel at how such poetry was championed and given its due when everywhere the subtle insights of the arts and humanities are under attack. This will be testament to both Wright’s vision and the inspired community that labours to read, publish and preserve it for a hopeful future One of the most innovative and visionary poets in the American and African-American traditions... [Transfigurations] synthesises Wright's philosophical and transcultural explorations with a dazzling and indelible linguistic music A substantial collection of work. [Wright’s] forcefully musical rhythms drive even poems of everyday experience—such as waiting outside church on a warm night—to a pleasingly contradictory transport. And the later, meditative poems are bound to the world by their attention to the sensual within the spiritual Jay Wright is a brilliant and original poet… beating his own unpredictable path through a variety of terrains An astonishing New World epic…of human transfiguration and transformation, of nothing less than the great work of art that is ‘our life among ourselves’