Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Robert Wrigley is the author of eight collections of poetry, including In the Bank of Beautiful Sins, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize; Reign of Snakes, winner of the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Lives of the Animals, winner of the 2004 Poet's Prize; and, most recently, Beautiful Country. He teaches at the University of Idaho and lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, near Moscow, Idaho.