Kept this by my bedside for about a year, thumbing through it regularly . Love it. Will read it many more times.Aug. '11: Gave this collection my first single-sitting reading today and love it even more. Here, Wright sits with his ear pressed to the heart of the world waiting for cryptic messages he knows he will never fully understand. Most of the poems here--especially the long-form "Journal of the Year of the Ox"--feel quilted, with weighty aphorisms stitched beside casual remembrances and endless (he might say failed) attempts to properly present the wonder of a tree or a cloud. Rather than poems bound thematically, they become something like "Thoughts I Had In a Particular Place" or "Thoughts I Had During an Unseasonably Warm October (Dated)". and as such we stumble through ideas with him, walking the steps toward the idea rather than simply being presented with the idea: you are privy to the process not the product. And it never hurts when your Virgil (this thing is riddled with Dante allusions) says things like this:--Our words, like blown kisses, are swallowed by ghostsAlong the way, their destinations bereftIn a rub of brightness unending
