A new volume of poetry by the newly named Poet Laureate of the US.  Teaching at UVA, Wright has won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize.  His poetry is worth re-reading for its beautiful sounds, exquisite phrasing, and deep insights into time, death, and life.  His work reminds me how great poetry differs from great non-fiction or novels.  The novels leave one with characters, plot, settings, scenes, and dialogue.  Non-fiction leaves you with facts, information, structure.  Poetry slips through your fingers.  The tremor of a gorgeous phrase, a perfect image, a great metaphor—-all slide away as the book closes.  Memorization is good, if one is young and capable, but I am left with a vague feeling, a fuzzy picture, a yearning to be able to recall and remember.  The only thing to do is to re-read and this book is worth doing again.  Phrases such as “Sunset same color as maple tree/in my neighbor’s yard—-/nature and nature head butt, golden persimmon.”   and from Everything passes, But Is it Time?:  “The membrane of metaphor is weak, and has no second step.”  A poem worth savoring:  Crystal Declension

Well, two things are certain—/the sun will rise and the sun will set./Most everything else is up for grabs./It’s back on its way down now/As a mother moose and her twin calves/Step lightly, lightly/across the creek through the understory/And half-lit grasses,/Then disappear in a clutch of willow bushes./If one, anyone,/Could walk through his own life as delicately, as sure,/As she did, all wreckage, all