A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright

As James Wright, one of the great lyric poets of the last century, wrote in a letter to a friend: "There is something about the very form and occasion of a letter--the possibility it offers, the chance to be as open and tentative and uncertain as one likes and also the chance to formulate certain ideas, very precisely--if one is lucky in one's thoughts."A Wild Perfectionis a riveting collection that captures the exhilarating and moving correspondence between Wright and his many friends. In his letters to fellow poets Donald Hall, Theodore Roethke, Galway Kinnell, James Dickey, Mary Oliver, and Robert Bly, Wright explored many subjects, poetic and personal, from his creative process to his struggles with depression and illness.A Wild Perfectionis no less than an epistolary chronicle of a significant part of the mid-century American poetry renaissance, as well as the clearest biographical picture now available of this major American poet.