Praise for Carolyne Wright

Winner of the 2007 Independent Publishers Book Awards, Poetry, Bronze award

The Independent Publisher Book Awards were conceived as a broad-based, unaffiliated awards program open to all members of the independent publishing industry. The awards are intended to bring increased recognition to the thousands of exemplary independent, university, and self-published titles produced each year, and reward those who exhibit the courage, innovation, and creativity to bring about change in the world of publishing.

"Carolyne Wright's latest poetry collection, A Change of Maps, reveals a ship's log of discovery and loss that will resonate especially with women of intellect who navigate the shoals of career and love at home and abroad. Wright reveals the strength of her intelligence, energy, and ambition in this present book. The opening poem, a tour de force abecedarian called "Studies with Miss Bishop," paints a humorous but devastating picture of an aging, financially pressed poet-in-residence who reluctantly presides over a "dazed / clutch of undergraduates." Adopting the formalism that Bishop demanded of her students, Wright crafts twenty-six couplets that not only begin with the requisite ABCs and end with subtle slant rhymes, but also entertain the reader with colorful vignettes and playful language that metamorphose into a double-edged pathos. In the language of cartography, the title poem characterizes the poet's--and other humans'--experience of dizzying change in a time of cosmic and cybernetic exploration. Wright steers her readers past ancient maps that can't explain "how such charts voyaged into the New World / of our luggage" into "microchips shrinking our wildest dreams."

"Coinciding with Mark Strand's idea in his book, The Continuous Life of Poetry, Wright uses poetry as a means of continuity, even survival, in a time of changing maps and shaken trust. With Elizabeth Bishop, Wright shares an easy, sophisticated display of language and vivid obsession with geography as metaphor. With Matthew Arnold, it's the will-o'-the-wisp search for answers that propels "The Scholar Gipsy." But in spite of these kinships, Wright is no clone of Arnold, Bishop, or Strand. She is sui generis, one of a kind, who writes brilliantly with her eyes on history, literature, and the stars. She also looks through the microscope of self and takes what she sees with a dash of salt, as well as a stab of the heart."

"Carolyne Wright—poet, intellectual, gypsy—is the author of eight books and chapbooks. The widely traveled and widely acclaimed writer has most recently published A Change of Maps, an award-winning collection that Elinor Benedict reviews in The Iowa Review as poetry that “strongly reveals a woman’s search for love, as well as a scholar’s parallel search for independence and intellectual fulfillment.” Wright has traveled the world (Latin America, India, Bangladesh) on research fellowships and translation projects, and the language of her poetry is grounded in metaphors of terrain, geography, and cartography as a way to explore and express the human response to desire and change. Her poems also bring her home: many of them return her to the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, where she was raised. “Return to Seattle: Bastille Day” opens with the following stunning imagery: “No difference in the gray gulls, sobbing / like women who circled the tumbrels, / scaffold silhouettes of fir. / The same sky lowers over the channel, / the plane follows it down / like an obsession, guillotine blade / of sun on water.”

"Although Wright may be regarded as a wanderer of the globe, her poems are crisp, precise, and controlled explosions of revelation, wit, and insight. Her first poem in A Change of Maps, “Studies with Miss Bishop,” exemplifies the formalism Wright was taught by her teacher, Elizabeth Bishop. An abecedarian form—beginning both lines of each couplet with each letter of the alphabet, in alphabetical order—this clever slant-rhymed poem introduces readers to her skill and to her themes of movement, isolation, intellectual hunger, and longing for connection."

"Carolyne Wright knows "how we will outsmart the distance," where, she says, "light lingers like an obsession," where sleepwalkers can be found "lost in the heart's / subzero weather," or where "Roethke blazed in mythic, maniacal / dolor," because we know it is the poet who can insist that "the truth, after all, / [is] our best rhetoric." Wright's perceptual care, her energy of language and its sounds, tethers and tightrope-walks, treats us to a mouth-to-mouth experience of music from the mind. In these poems, Man is placed somewhere center-front in the big theater of Nature. With a true "profusion of the senses," measures of loss that are "green as sorrow," and love in its "sea-displacing passion," Wright convinces us that our mission is insight, our history lesson to be learned in "the heart's unfinished country." And so, her skill is our reward."

"Formally elegant, thematically intelligent, urgent and thoughtful, A Change of Maps traverses the American landscape—its primal beauty and human diminishment—and explores the tensions in the nature of this country, its mix of cultures, and its losses both national and personal. In these brilliant and intuitive poems, Carolyne Wright reflects on love and independence, love and work, choices made in youth and the larger awarenesses that enable the world and the species to continue."

"The latest poetry collection by award-winning author and poet Carolyne Wright, A Change of Maps, examines the power of travel, destiny, love and independence, as well as what it means to live in separate worlds and experience the clash of cultures. The free-verse conveys a bright and fresh approach to the challenges of destiny, in this lively and boldly enlightening compilation. "The Ice-Climber": A single climber, making his way  / handhold by handhold over the blue / labial folds of the glacier.  / A man roped only to himself / under a sky closing down, breaking the first rule of avalanche weather.  / Never climb on ice alone. // "He's either crazy," you whispered, / "or extremely good." /  Your broken climber's trepidation. / Who else would train / for the North Face of the Eiger?"

"Carolyne Wright starts her new collection of (mostly) first-person, autobiographical poems with a humdinger about studying with Elizabeth Bishop.  By composing a poem that draws attention to the indirect, often slippery nature of literary pedagogy, Wright unobtrusively assumes a place in the line of succession.  "Studies with Miss Bishop" provides a foundational shot, as it both applies Bishop's lessons and brings up the subjects that will be Wright's own: the past, the present coordinates, how divergence is the shape of time, and the importance of origins. The book's title signals both adoption of purpose and a departure from the teacher. And yet Wright's imagination, like Bishop's, redresses facts and their rebarbative edges, shape-shifting through art's chastening forms—and therefore providing a kind of compensation with the way life evolves, while memory devolves into discontinuities of meaning.

"Carolyne Wright's journey through nearly four decades shows that the past is often a world that resists disclosure, and yet the fact is less a fact about the past than a fact about our ability to find signposts among contingent scenarios. Wright has this ability; which is less a concession to the spell of technique (which she owns) than a kind of knowledge about poetry's secret sway and coterie wisdom and therefore of abiding interest to poetry's serious readers—be they ever so few—who know that the intramural is what we used to call the universal, but know also that that is no come-down but a field promotion fitting for the lean hereafter."

"Carolyne Wright’s poems adventure with candor and heart—traveling into the hushed-up Fifties, onto subway platforms, through rain storms, through early drafts of love and the heart’s sub-zero weather. Everywhere, Wright sees her native territory with travel-widened eyes, even when moving across the brown lawns of Mid-America. Here, Argus and Preacher Bob co-exist, also ghazals and microchips, the Bronze Age and rusted Westinghouses, the shaman and the xerox machine. As childhoods wave goodbye, and whole coastlines wander off, Wright finds pinions in music (it is her job, she says, to mimic the wild crane’s cry), and in the promise of life unfolding. This poet carries a passport whose exit visas—like her poems—are a measure of a buoyant survival."

"Carolyne Wright explores in poetry what it means to live in different worlds, and probes with great sensitivity what it means to live in two or more different worlds at the same time . . . Wright writes with passion, eloquence, and clear moral perspective."

"This book is Wright's tribute to Elizabeth Bishop, beginning with a double abecedarian—rhymed couplets for each letter—on being Bishop's pupil. Wright re-travels her mentor's concerns and themes re: geographic space and personal/historical time. A sestina dedicated to Bishop's memory muses on travel: modern tourism and medieval Crusades—"Someday these cities may be nothing but hotels." Like Bishop's, these poems are exquisite in form, insightful in theme. As many say of Bishop, Carolyne Wright is indeed 'a poet's poet.'"

—Vince Gotera, 
North American Review, Jan-Feb 2006

“Turn away no more; “Why wilt thou turn away? “The starry floor, “The wat’ry shore, “Is giv’n thee till the break of day.” —William Blake, Songs of Experience

The naked lovers sprawl on a “wat’ry shore.”
His right hand fingers, absently, the sea
slapping at its tidal mark. His left hand
keeps moving over her thigh. Why? His love
has swelled and ebbed, he turns his head away.
So close they could almost touch it above their bed

An eagle swoops . . . Once I lay in your king-sized bed,
embracing you like that woman on the shore.
I’d thrown caution, like a no-deposit can, away,
and chattered on about the all-surrounding sea
as the poets’ emblem of unfettered love.
You turned over, yawning into your hand.

“What do you see in the lifelines on your hand?”
I asked. “Nothing about you,” you said. Our bed,
it seems, a momentary lapse—an excuse for love
we’d dropped between us like a net, to shore
up our sands from dissolving in an alien sea
before some reclamation bureau dredged the tide away.

Since then I’ve moved time and tidal zones away
and you’re the developer on TV whose hand
sweeps back to reveal the view lots by the sea,
the blueprints scattered on some happy couple’s bed.
You know the cost of each square inch of shore,
call a good investment “Your finest act of love.”

What was I but an early draft of love?
Your contractors changed the woman, hauled away
birdlife, trees—all but the cost-effective shore.
I’ve owned up to the deeds passing through my hands,
detain no wheeler-dealers in my bed
and sign all petitions to preserve the sea.

No engraving saves or replicates the sea—
the etching crude, ink gouaches gauche as love
between True Confession’s covers. One printer’s bed
laid wrong upsets the whole edition. Ages away,
Blake, hell-bent, shook his stylus hand
at heaven. I X-out houses on protected shores.

The poet cried, “Turn away no more!” The sea
falls and rises again in its bed between shores,
and love is our wealth. It holds nothing in its hands.

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