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Transfigurations

Collected Poems

For over half a century, Jay Wright’s poetry has been celebrated for its alertness to the multiplicity of human experience and identity, and championed by eminent literary figures from Carl Phillips to Harold Bloom.

The gravitational pull of Wright’s lyric voice 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 and West African cultural forms, Wright disentangles 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 a career-defining volume that includes all of Wright’s twentieth century major 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) and Transformations (1997).

Transfigurations is a singular opportunity for readers to fully immerse themselves in the sublime imagination of one of the most profound and enigmatic American poets.

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

Rebecca Tamás, Guardian

About Jay Wright

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.
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