C. D. Wright

continued

explored the wonder and found a way, entirely her own, to bring her readers into it.

Although the winner of just about every award a poet can win, including a MacArthur "genius" grant, and a writer who has always stressed her connection to a couple of very specific places (the Ozarks of Arkansas, where she

grew up, and Rhode Island, where she has lived for many years while teaching at Brown University), Wright has often been described as an "elliptical" or "oblique" or "difficult" poet. It is true that Wright often doesn't provide the connecting links between parts of her poems, but a reader willing to follow her jumps of perception will find the poems as easy to read as Robert Frost's. Wright worked out this method most clearly in Deepstep Come Shining, a 1998 book-length reflection on the American South and on the nature of her own memory.