Chickamauga was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1995, opening Wright’s second trilogy of poetry collections. The title refers to the Civil War battlefield in northwest Georgia, near Wright’s birthplace in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee — a landscape saturated with history and death that provides the ground bass for these meditations on memory, loss, and the passage of time.
The poems here mark Wright’s full maturity: the long line has replaced the compressed image, and the poems unfold as extended meditations rather than crystalline lyrics. Wright moves freely between concrete observation (the mockingbird outside the window, the dogwood blooming, the clouds over the Blue Ridge) and abstract reflection (the nature of time, the absence of God, the impossibility of transcendence). The effect is something like a journal kept by a contemplative — each poem a day’s entry in an ongoing spiritual practice conducted without the support of any received faith.
The title poem and “Christmas East of the Blue Ridge” are among Wright’s finest achievements, and the collection as a whole established the pattern — seasonal observation generating metaphysical speculation — that would structure the rest of his career. Wright’s position is unique in American poetry: a Southern Protestant who has lost his faith but not his religious sensibility, a Poundian imagist who writes discursively, a poet of ideas whose ideas are always embodied in particular landscapes.
Collecting Chickamauga
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1995): Trade paperback with French flaps.
Market values:
- First printing: $15–$40
- Signed copies: $50–$125