Scar Tissue was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006, opening Wright’s third trilogy (completed by Littlefoot and Sestets). Wright is now in his seventies, and the poems address aging and mortality with a directness that his earlier work — for all its metaphysical preoccupation with death — had avoided. The title acknowledges what time does to the body and to memory: it leaves scars, tough fibrous replacements for what was originally smooth and whole.
The Virginia landscape is still the ground of contemplation, but the observer’s relationship to it has shifted. The seasons turn, the light falls on the mountains, the birds return each spring — but the poet watching them knows that his own returns are numbered. This gives the poems a weight and urgency that the earlier meditative work sometimes lacked. Wright is no longer a man in the middle of life contemplating eternity; he is a man approaching eternity who finds that the particular — this tree, this shadow, this afternoon — is more precious than ever.
Technically, the poems continue the long-lined meditative mode of the previous trilogies, but there is a new compression: many poems are shorter, more concentrated, as if Wright is conserving energy for what is essential. The effect is of a poet who has achieved such mastery of his form that he can say more with less.
Collecting Scar Tissue
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2006): Trade paperback with French flaps.
Market values:
- First printing: $10–$25
- Signed copies: $30–$75