This vivid presentation of Campana demonstrates why Italian readers have cherished his poems since the first appearance of Canti Orfici in 1914. Charles Wright’s translation, Jonathan Galassi’s introduction, and, as afterword, Montale’s thoughtful essay on Campana, identify the heart of this poet’s achievement.

Winner of the PEN Translation Prize, these translations by noted American poet Charles Wright bring one of the major collections of poetry in this century to English-speaking authors. Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale considered La Bufera e Altro (The Storm and Other Poems) his best book.

In the 1960s, Charles Wright’s (1932–2008) star was on the rise. After dropping out of high school and serving in the Korean War, the young Black writer landed in New York, where he was mentored by Norman Mailer, signed a book deal with a leading publisher, and was celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.

Over the decades to follow, Wright would lead a peripatetic and at times precarious life, moving between Tangier, Veracruz, Paris, and New York, penning a regular column for the Village Voice, living off the goodwill of his friends, and battling addiction and, later, mental health issues. As W. Lawrence Hogue shows, Wright’s innovative fiction stands apart, offering a different vision of outcast Black Americans in the postwar era and using satire to bring agency and humanity to working-class characters. This critical biography—the first devoted to Wright’s significant but largely forgotten story—brings new attention to the writer’s impressive body of work, in the context of a wild, but troubled, life.

From the extraordinary diversity of contemporary poetry, Peter Stitt, the distinguished critic and editor of the Gettysburg Review, has chosen in this book to write about five poets only, all premier practitioners—John Ashbery, Stephen Dobyns, Charles Simic, Gerald Stern, and Charles Wright, with a special look at Stanley Kunitz in relation to Wright. Stitt's confident and inventive assessments of these fine poets' work help us gain some focus on the “uncertainty and plenitude” of the current poetry scene, demonstrating that concentrated and knowledgeable criticism can show us ways to begin measuring the accomplishments of our poetic age.

Stitt's interest in these five poets is intellectual and aesthetic. As he states, “I chose these particular writers because their work continues to interest me deeply, both intellectually and formally, even after years of familiarity.” He uses his understanding of the philosophical implications inherent in modern physics, as they apply to both content and form, as the basis for his close analysis.

Stitt attends to the poets' writerly strategies so that we may discover in their poetry where “surface form” intersects and complements meaning and thus becomes, in John Berryman's terms, “deep form.” He explains what these poets say and how they say it and what relationships lie between. He also shows how humor plays a part in some of their work.