Collected Poems

Collected Poems brings together James Wright's work from his formal debut, The Green Wall, chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1956 and published the next year, through the looser, image driven poems he was writing by the late 1960s, letting a reader watch a poet trained in strict meter deliberately abandon it in search of something closer to the plain, wounded voice of the Ohio steel and glass towns he grew up in.

Wright's father worked in a glass factory and his mother in a laundry, and Martins Ferry, Ohio, the depressed industrial town where he grew up, stays present across the whole book, most directly in "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," one of his most frequently anthologized poems. "A Blessing," the collection's other widely anthologized piece, turns instead toward the natural world, part of a broader shift in Wright's later work toward what critics call deep image poetics, poems built around a single charged image rather than argument or narrative. Both poems show what Wright gained by dropping fixed meter in the early 1960s under the influence of Spanish language surrealists and his own translation work with his friend Robert Bly: a plainer syntax capable of turning, without warning, toward real tenderness.

Reading the book means tracking one poet's whole development from formal apprentice to a mature, open form voice built around sudden, exact images rather than argument, moving between Depression era Midwest poverty, working class experience, and close attention to animals and the natural world. It suits a reader who wants American poetry's Midwestern, working class strain at its most emotionally direct, unguarded in a way the era's more ironic poets generally were not.