Poems examine the nature of morality and personal values in the modern world

In the Bank of Beautiful Sins: Poems (Poets, Penguin)

Literature & Fiction

Wrigley, Robert

United States

Penguin??Books

Described by the late James Dickey as "one of the finest new poets to come along in years," Robert Wrigley fulfills that early promise with this, his newest collection. Reign of Snakes is a book about desire, the soul's desire as much as the body's. As Jane Hirshfield said of Wrigley's previous book, In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995), "To read it is to unpeel a little further into the human, and into the wideness that holds the human--a splendid gift." Reign of Snakes takes us to yet another level, deep into the daily devotions, "where the dark blows a kiss to night."
. . . a frigid day in February and a full-grownrattlesnake curled to a comma in the middle of the middle of the just-plowed road. Ice ghost, I think, curve of rock or stubbed-off branch. But the diamonds are there, under a dust of crystals looming, impossible, summer's tattoo, the mythical argyle of evil. 
 --from "Reign of Snakes"

Reign of Snakes (Penguin Poets)

Poetry

Lives of the Animals takes us to that place where the boundaries between predator and prey, the observer and the observed, merge, reverse, become re-imagined. We find ourselves inside a story of death and life, witness to acts of survival so primal they seem less instinctive than passionate. And it is passion that most informs these poems: the bond between lovers, between parent and child, between humans and other animals, both wild and domestic, that populate our shared world of hunger and need.

Lives of the Animals (Penguin Poets)

One of his generation's most accomplished poets, Robert Wrigley is renowned for his ironic, powerful, and lucid style as well as his ability to fuse narrative and lyrical impulses. Earthly Meditations features nineteen original poems alongside a collection of sixty-one poems chosen from his first six books.

Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin Poets)

Genre Fiction

Penguin Publishing Group

A powerful new collection from an award-winning poet. At the heart of Robert Wrigley's new book are the fears that find us at the darkest times and the hopes we rise to each morning. These poems explore that point where the sacred and the profane come together, that place of beauty inside the grotesque and the grotesque inside what is beautiful. The laws of nature, the commandments of capitalism, and the rules of war are transformed into songs of longing, patriotism, and dissent; we are also reminded of the grace residing in the glimpse of a horse under a full moon or the preserved lock of a lover's hair. Elegiac and lyrical, playful and angry, Beautiful Country offers a vision of a country that is unflinching, demanding, and generous.

Beautiful Country (Penguin Poets)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

A powerful new collection from an award-winning poet Robert Wrigley has become one of his generation's most accomplished poets, renowned for his irony, power, and lucid style and for his ability to fuse narrative and lyrical impulses. Like its namesake—Robert Burton's seventeenth-century examination of human thoughts and emotions—Wrigley's new collection means to examine our world through the lens of melancholia. From imagined war memorials to insomniac chickens; from Descartes' lost daughter to a dreaming tree; from King Kong to Rush Limbaugh; and from Anna Karenina to a man named Lucy Doolin (short for Lucifer), these are poems that elegize and celebrate that most beautiful, exasperating, joyous, miserable, and perfectly imperfect of all creatures—the human being.

Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (Penguin Poets)

A powerful new collection from an acclaimed, award-winning poet With nine previously published collections of poetry, Robert Wrigley has become one of his generation's most accomplished poets, renowned for his irony, power, and lucid style and for his ability to fuse narrative and lyrical impulses. Wrigley's tenth collection, Box, is a book of poems obsessed with human containment, with the way people are contained or confined—by time, mortality, technology, identity, culture, and history—in almost everything they are and everything they do. Even the body, even the poem itself, is in this regard a kind of self-containing crate, in which the human being, perhaps the human spirit, is shipped into the world at large. But Box is also a book obsessed with escape from containment, and escape comes from dreams, from deep awareness, from contemplation, from love, and above all, as Wallace Stevens insisted, from "the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality." The poems in Box aim to do nothing less than "help people live their lives," as Stevens put it.

Box (Penguin Poets)

From an award-winning poet, a new collection that endeavors to pass along what the things of the earth are telling us\nOver the course of his career Robert Wrigley has won acclaim for the emotional toughness, sonic richness, and lucid style of his poems, and for his ability to fuse narrative and lyrical impulses. In his new collection, Wrigley means to use poetry to capture the primal conversation between human beings and the perilously threatened planet on which they love and live, proceeding from a line from Auden: “All we are not stares back at what we are.” In language that is both elegiac and playful, declarative and yet ringingly musical; in traditional sonnets, quatrains, and free verse, Wrigley transcribes the consciousness and significance of every singing thing—in order to sing back.

The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin Poets)

Dramas & Plays

Review Appalonea (appalonea Miller Voisin, 1840-1901) Aubade For Mothers The Bees The Beliefs Of A Horse Collection The Creche Fireflies The Glow Heart Attack The Leaning House Lover Of Life Moon In A Mason Jar Moonlight: Chickens On The Road Mowing Nightcrawlers The Owl Pheasant Hunting A Photo Of Immigrants, 1903 Running In Your Sleep The Secret Life In Every Standing Thing The Skull Of A Snowshoe Hare The Sound Barrier Star Dust Termites Those Riches Torch Songs Touching The Carp Volunteers Weaver Of Wind Yard Work -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® From Library Journal Wrigley's poetry is concentrated like fruit in a mason jar"the yolky peaches, wine cherries,/ the cool lunar lobes of the pears." Many poems respond to "The Secret Life in Every Standing Thing"including termites, nightcrawlers, fireflies, etc.evoking (as Marianne Moore's poems did) the otherworldliness of the ordinary. Their force resides in the poet's compassion for his subject: an owl"white/ and blazing with moonlight"snatching up a kitten; a man's heart attack as he tosses his child in the air; a young boy after a car accident "ambling barefoot through the jeweled debris,/ glass slitting little bloodstars" in his soles. Wrigley conveys magical moments of perception when life holds us in a "fierce and powerful grip." Frank Allen, Assoc. Dean, Continuing Education, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

MOON IN MASON JAR

University of Illinois Press

WHAT MY FATHER BELIEVED: Poems

Religion & Spirituality

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Books by Wrigley, Robert