Selected Poems of Jay Wright

Jay Wright, an eclectic poet attentive to the black traditions binding the Americas to West Africa, is also profoundly influenced by Latin American cultures. Drawing on the history of his childhood home in New Mexico, he has other models as various as Dante's Commedia, Marcel Griaule and his team of French anthropologists, Suzanne Langer, J.B. Danquah's Akan Doctrine of God, and American jazz discourses. This selection of Wright's work from the publication of his first full-length book The Homecoming Singer in 1971 up to the present represents the range and power of his mythopoetic imagination and his concern for the fate of culture. In a 1984 interview Wright explained his goals as follows: "A young man, hearing me read some of my poems, said that I seemed to be trying to weave together a lot of different things. My answer was that they are already woven, I'm just trying to uncover the weave." These poems exemplify Wright's "uncovering" of the multicultural process of human history, seen by the poet on a loom of transatlantic traditions.Stepto, Robert B. is the author of 'Selected Poems of Jay Wright' with ISBN 9780691066875 and ISBN 0691066876.