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Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms, and Praise for LoisAuthor: Jay Wright American Literature Series April 2008 130 pages, Dimensions: 5 x 8 Paperback, 978-1-56478-499-5 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $10.36—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
A gift for his wife, Jay Wright’s Polynomials and Pollen explores the complementary exigencies of abstraction and physicality. In five sections, each arranged under the aegis of a tutelary concept—from the Yoruba, Akan, Bamana, and Náhuatl—the book is a constellation of protophilosophical inquiry into notions of order, disarray, evidence, flowering, and return; it is also a dynamically visceral work whose feelingtones register rage as well as devotion.
About the Author
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Jay Wright—poet, essayist, playwright—was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1934. He has been the recipient of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship, the Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, and the 1996 Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Most recently, Wright was named the 2005 recipient of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. He lives in Bradford, Vermont.
Photo by Don J. Usner. |
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Praise
"A major voice in American poetry."—Publishers Weekly“Jay Wright is a brilliant and original poet, difficult and allusive, beating his own unpredictable path through a variety of terrains.”—John Hollander, New York Times
"Wright invites us to roam the cultures of the transatlantic world, to speak and know many tongues, to partake of the rituals through which we may be initiated into modes of individual and communal enhancement. In yet another age of great uncertainty, Wright enables us to imagine that breaking the vessels of the past is more an act of uncovering than of sheer destruction, and that we need not necessarily choose between an intellectual and a spiritual life, for both can still be had."—Robert B. Stepto
"Wright is an intellectual poet, a poet’s poet, upon whose tabula rasa may be read influences of Dante, Eliot, the African griots, Alejo Carpentier, and Nicolás Guillén."—Library Journal
The fothergilla major
becomes
an acceptable
device for spring.
The poet
measures his anxiety
in the glabrous leaf,
or the conspicuous white of May.
So much is a dream
of orange yellow autumn
mountains,
so much is the inconspicuous
nerve rending of solitude
where the garden begins, or ends,
---the shrub teaching
the exhilaration of retreat,
perhaps a rest,
perhaps the deciduous
invention of time.
One must carefully walk
these paths,
for the color burns,
and the acid underfoot
commemorates
an ethereal disappearance.
Nothing speaks easily---
of possession
or of the authentic river
and that special case,
that indeterminable event
beyond the light of darkness.
So the shrub awakens
a spontaneous proof
of kinship in moist
soil, shadows and sun,
and every resolution
can only be true
or false.