Oblivion Banjo: The Poetry of Charles Wright was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2019 as Wright’s comprehensive collected poems, gathering more than fifty years of work into a single volume of over eight hundred pages. The title — with its yoking of existential dread and folk-music whimsy — is characteristic of Wright’s sensibility: the banjo suggests Appalachian roots music, the homemade and the local, while “oblivion” names the darkness against which all art is played.
The volume allows readers to see what the individual collections only hint at: the extraordinary consistency and coherence of Wright’s career. From the compressed, image-driven lyrics of Hard Freight (1973) through the expansive meditative sequences of the trilogies to the diamond-compressed Sestets of his late period, Wright has pursued the same questions — the nature of memory, the meaning of landscape, the presence or absence of the divine — with an intensity and formal inventiveness that never flags.
The collected format also reveals the architecture of the trilogies: the nine books that constitute his three trilogies (each a triptych structured around a central theme) can be read as a single continuous meditation, a life’s work in the way that The Cantos or Paterson were life’s works — except that Wright’s poem is made of discrete moments rather than epic ambition.
Collecting Oblivion Banjo
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2019): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Signed copies: $75–$175