Editorial Review:
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Littlefoot, the eighteenth book from one of this country’s most acclaimed poets, is an extended meditation on mortality, on the narrator’s search of the skies for a road map and for last instructions on the other side of my own death.” Following the course of one year, the poet’s seventieth, we witness the seasons change over his familiar postage stamps of soil, realizing that we are reflected in them, that the true affinity is between writer and subject, human and nature, one becoming the other, as the river is like our blood, it powers on, / out of sight, out of mind.” Seeded with lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, here we meet solitude, resignation, and a glad cry that while a return to the beloved earth is impossible, all things come from splendor,” and the urgent question that the poet can’t help but ask: Will you miss me when I’m gone? Charles Wright was awarded the National Book Award in Poetry in 1983 for Country Music and the 1995 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Chickamauga. In 2008, he was honored for his lifetime achievement with the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. After the end of something, there comes another end,
This one behind you, and far away.
Only a lifetime can get you to it,
and then just barely.
Littlefoot, the eighteenth book from one of this country’s most acclaimed poets, is an extended meditation on mortality, on the narrator’s search of the skies for a road map and for last instructions on the other side of my own death.” Following the course of one year, the poet’s seventieth, we witness the seasons change over his familiar postage stamps of soil, realizing that we are reflected in them, that the true affinity is between writer and subject, human and nature, one becoming the other, as the river is like our blood, it powers on, / out of sight, out of mind.” Seeded with lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, here we meet solitude, resignation, and a glad cry that while a return to the beloved earth is impossible, all things come from splendor,” and the urgent question that the poet can't help but ask: Will you miss me when I'm gone?" Somewhere in his work, layered with echoes of the masters, there is always room to connect [Wright's] highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives. Littlefoot is a book length poem full of bluegrass, spirituals and Appalachian sunsets. And these, in turn, make up the soundtrack and scenery for the arc of time Wright has lived and recorded in these pages.”Dionisio Martinez, The Miami Herald Though we seldom speak of Charles Wright as a religious poet, at least not as we might discuss George Herbert or Gerard Manley Hopkins, he is nevertheless among the most spiritual of American poets of the last 50 years . . . This latest collection, actually one long poem composed of 35 numbered but unnamed sections, is another in a series of maps that illustrate Wright’s way of living, as pilgrim, between the seen and the unseen, attempting to come as close as possible to the light. This life and art of pilgrimageWright has always been conscious of his age, of the ticking of the clock, and Littlefoot makes much of his arrival at 70involves a rich and detailed awareness, in this case very like Hopkin’s own uncanny sensitivity, of the physical world. Landscape, memory, desire, and a wistful acknowledgment of death crowd each page . . . Wright is a pilgrim of the spirit, always on the road, like the Japanese poet Basho, always the reluctant disciple, unambiguous about the holy but burdened with doubt about the holes where the nails have been. And this confluence of spirituality and emptiness brings us to the heritage of Appalachia still present in Wright’s work.”David Garrison, America
Somewhere in his work, layered with echoes of the masters, there is always room to connect his highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives. Littlefoot is a book length poem full of bluegrass, spirituals and Appalachian sunsets. And these, in turn, make up the soundtrack and scenery for the arc of time Wright has lived and recorded in these pages. But this is not the work of a journalist or a historian; it is closer to what an abstract painter produces. The shapes on the canvas are not meant to be reproductions of things in the world, but the world is all we know, and we can’t help seeing in the painting the shapes of familiar things, like the ones we saw in clouds when we were children.”Dionisio Martinez, The Miami Herald
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Reader Reviews for Littlefoot: A Poem:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: After Image-Picking
Comment: One way to read "Littlefoot" is as an imagist's attempt to write a long poem. (Wright aptly calls himself an "image-picker" somewhere in this book.) It is a single poem rather than a sequence; in fact, the "plot" connecting nearby poems -- the progression of seasons -- is often clearer than the loose thematic connections between the segments of an individual poem. As Wright explained in "Apologia pro Vita Sua," his basic form is the journal. The "journal" -- of Wright's 70th year -- tracks his thoughts and surroundings from one October to the next. Wright has always been admired for his ability to write so interestingly about so little; in "Littlefoot," the subject matter has dwindled to essentially nothing, and the writing is as good as ever. All the poems are in Wright's usual two-step free verse line (lines that begin in lowercase are indented):
The great mouth of the west hangs open,
mountain incisors beginning to bite
Into the pink flesh of the sundown. (14)
When the rains blow, and the hurricane flies,
nobody has the right box
To fit the arisen in.
Out of the sopped earth, out of dank bones,
They seep in their watery strings
wherever the water goes.
Who knows when their wings will dry out, who knows their next knot? (1)
The stars drift like cold fires through the watery roots of heaven (13)
A little knowledge of landscape whets isolation.
This is a country of water,
of water and rigid trees
That flank it and fall beneath its weight.
They lie like stricken ministers, grey and unredeemed. (20)
Tree-shadows lying like limbed logs across the meadow,
Sinking into the hill's shadow that stalks them... (21)
I remember the way the mimosa tree
buttered the shade
Outside the basement bedroom, soaked in its yellow bristles. (1)
I love the winter light, so thin, so unbuttery,
Transparent as plastic wrap,
Clinging so effortlessly
to whatever it skins over. (14)
Pipistrello, and gun of motorcycles downhill,
A flirt and a gritty punctuation to the day's demise
And one-starred exhalation, (32)
Stars like motorcycle exhaust
Through the limp leaves of maple trees (33)
As these examples indicate, the descriptions pile up and provide a rich context for each other (keeping "unbuttery" fresh rather than weird), and the last image, in particular, has the weight of the whole book's seeing and thinking behind it. The narrative sections work this way too -- e.g. the story of the Hunter Gracchus is introduced in poem 9, and in poem 24 is applied to the quarter moon "like a sail with no ship / and no port to come home to." The straight-up philosophizing merges into the general currents of thought, too, but it's less compelling as writing than the bits that have their eye on the actual world.
One virtue that Wright's later verse tends to lack is tautness. The gentle meandering of this long poem might irritate some readers -- not me, surprisingly enough! -- who should still enjoy the poems collected in "Negative Blue" and earlier volumes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Another work of genius
Comment: Few poets have been as successful at finding the spiritual in the ordinary as Charles Wright has -- Louise Gluck comes to mind, and possibly Jack Gilbert -- but even these titans have not represented the metaphysics of the quotidian as consistently and convincingly as Wright. In a large portion of Wright's poetry the setting is the same: Wright is sitting on his porch chair in his backyard -- sounds boring doesn't it -- but it's not -- because Wright's not just sitting in his backyard, he's sitting in eternity and beholding heaven with all of its rough edges. There is a gospel in the landscape, a language amid the peony blossoms and the sparrows.
Customer Rating:
Summary: brilliant light
Comment: Just back from a few days in Charlottesville where I was able to read this out (and the series of poems in the current edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review) on the screened-in porch. Although the book is subtitled "a poem," it's really a cycle of well paced poems in which Wright brings us through meditations on aging, philosophy, and best guessed conclusions with linguistic certainty. If you've been lucky enough to have been reading Wright for a while, read this when you can. If you're new to the poet, it's a good place to start to begin a reading relationship that will challenge, relax, entertain, and satisfy.
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