Country Music: Selected Early Poems was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1982 and won the American Book Award for Poetry. It draws from Wright’s first four collections — The Grave of the Right Hand (1970), Hard Freight (1973), Bloodlines (1975), and China Trace (1977) — and presents the development of a poetic voice that would become one of the most distinctive in American poetry.
The early poems show Wright working out his relationship to his masters — Ezra Pound, Eugenio Montale, Dino Campana — and to the landscape of his childhood in the American South. The Italy poems (Wright spent time in Italy as a young man) bring a Mediterranean intensity of light and image into English, while the Tennessee and Virginia poems find a way to write about Southern landscape without the weight of Southern literary tradition (no Faulkner, no Agrarians, no Gothic).
Wright’s characteristic method is already visible here: the poem as a sequence of luminous images, held together not by narrative or argument but by the quality of attention. His line is shorter and more compressed than it would later become, closer to the Imagists, but the metaphysical ambition — the desire to use concrete images as vehicles for abstract meditation — is already fully present.
Collecting Country Music
First edition (Wesleyan University Press, 1982): Trade paperback original. American Book Award winner.
Market values:
- First printing: $20–$50
- Signed copies: $50–$125