Like Something Flying Backwards

C.D. Wright’s work is enormously varied: she was an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvented herself with each new volume. Much of her poetry is rooted in the landscape and people of her childhood in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. Long admired for the honed ferocity of her vision, she wrote with a distinctive Southern accent and a cinematic eye, cut with a secular wit that only slightly tempers her exigency. The resulting poems are hypnotic documentaries that offer what she called ‘a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning’. Like Something Flying Backwards was the first UK edition of her work, and presents a wide range of her lyrics, narratives, prose poems and odes. Based on Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (2003), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, its selection was expanded to include more later work as well as new poems not then published in book form in the US, and the complete text of her book-length poem, Deepstep Come Shining.

C.D. Wright (1949-2016) published many books of poetry and prose, including two book-length poems, Deepstep Come Shining (1998) and Just Whistle (1993); Cooling Time (2005), a book comprised of poetry, memoir and essay; and One with Others (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2013), both a book-length poem and a work of investigative journalism. Her first UK retrospective, Like Something Flying Backwards: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), was expanded from Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2003), including a substantial number of the poems from her Griffin International Prize-winning collection Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). Her book of ‘prosimetrical essays’, The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, was published by Copper Canyon a few days before her totally unexpected death in January 2016. Her many honours included a Lannan Literary Award, a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship and the $50,000 2009 Griffin International Poetry Prize for Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). She was a professor of English at Brown University, and edited Lost Roads Publishers for 30 years with her husband, poet Forrest Gander. She collaborated on many projects with photographer Deborah Luster, most recently One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003/2007). She was State Poet of Rhode Island from 1995 to 1999.