Appalachia was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998, appearing between Chickamauga (1995) and Black Zodiac (1997) as the middle volume of Wright’s second trilogy (though published after Black Zodiac, it was written as the central panel). The collection focuses on the Appalachian landscape — both Wright’s current home in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge, and his childhood memories of eastern Tennessee — as the ground for his continuing meditation on time, memory, and transcendence.
The poems here are among Wright’s most accessible, anchored firmly in the natural world and in the rhythms of daily life — gardening, watching birds, walking the back roads, observing the seasons turn. But the accessibility is deceptive: Wright’s apparently casual observations are always charged with metaphysical implication. A dead dog in the road, a hawk over the meadow, the shadow of a cloud on the mountain — each becomes an emblem of the larger questions that drive his work: what persists after death, whether nature offers any meaning beyond itself, what it means to live without faith in a world that demands it.
Wright’s technical achievement here is to maintain poetic intensity across long, seemingly discursive sequences — the poems never feel padded or slack, despite their length, because every line carries the weight of attention. His ear for the American sentence — its rhythms, its pauses, its characteristic way of turning a thought — is impeccable.
Collecting Appalachia
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1998): Trade paperback with French flaps.
Market values:
- First printing: $15–$35
- Signed copies: $40–$100