Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011 and completes the triptych of selected volumes that spans Wright’s career (following Country Music: Selected Early Poems and Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems). It draws from the collections published between 2004 and 2009 — Buffalo Yoga, Scar Tissue, Littlefoot, and Sestets — and presents the definitive selection of Wright’s late period.
The poems of this period share a quality of valediction — not morbid or self-pitying, but clear-eyed in their acknowledgment that the seasons will continue turning after the observer is gone. Wright’s Virginia landscape has become so deeply internalized that he can evoke it in a few strokes — a color, a quality of light, a bird-call — and the reader is there. The compression of the late work (particularly the Sestets, each poem exactly six lines) demonstrates Wright’s continuing formal invention: even in his seventies, he was finding new shapes for his perennial concerns.
The volume also serves as an introduction to Wright for readers unfamiliar with his work — it contains some of his most luminous and accessible poems, and the chronological arrangement reveals the deepening of his art without requiring knowledge of the earlier books.
Collecting Bye-and-Bye
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011): Trade paperback with French flaps.
Market values:
- First printing: $10–$25
- Signed copies: $30–$75