Bloodaxe Books | Robert Wrigley: The Church of Omnivorous Light @BloodaxeBooks | Uploaded January 2019 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
Robert Wrigley is a poet of America’s northern Rocky Mountains. Over three decades his poetry’s pervading concerns have been rural Western landscapes and humankind’s place within the natural world. His most recent poems have presented a portrait of a nation, one that is a singular part of a singular planet, with an exuberant and frequently exasperating culture. In such a country, the glimpse of a horse under a full moon can be a defining moment, full of grace and a new, if not always comfortable, awareness. So it is with a saved lock of a lover’s hair, the memory of a vanished glacier, or a childhood friend disappeared in war. Elegiac and lyrical, playful and angry, his poetry offers a vision that is fierce, unflinching, and clear.
His first book to be published in the UK, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), draws on several collections published in the US. Here he reads five poems from that selection: ‘Moonlight: Chickens on the Road’, ‘Heart Attack, ‘County’, ‘Mouth’ and ‘A Lock of Her Hair’. Neil Astley filmed Robert Wrigley reading his poems in the basement of the Butchery, Helen Ivory and Martin Figura’s home after his reading the previous evening for Café Writers Norwich. On viewing the subterranean footage, Astley decided that a black and white treatment was necessary, one which was nevertheless in keeping with Wrigley’s author photographs, which are always Old West monochrome. This film is from the DVD-anthology IN PERSON: WORLD POETS, filmed and edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). For more details please see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-church-of-omnivorous-light-1061
Robert Wrigley is a poet of America’s northern Rocky Mountains. Over three decades his poetry’s pervading concerns have been rural Western landscapes and humankind’s place within the natural world. His most recent poems have presented a portrait of a nation, one that is a singular part of a singular planet, with an exuberant and frequently exasperating culture. In such a country, the glimpse of a horse under a full moon can be a defining moment, full of grace and a new, if not always comfortable, awareness. So it is with a saved lock of a lover’s hair, the memory of a vanished glacier, or a childhood friend disappeared in war. Elegiac and lyrical, playful and angry, his poetry offers a vision that is fierce, unflinching, and clear.
His first book to be published in the UK, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), draws on several collections published in the US. Here he reads five poems from that selection: ‘Moonlight: Chickens on the Road’, ‘Heart Attack, ‘County’, ‘Mouth’ and ‘A Lock of Her Hair’. Neil Astley filmed Robert Wrigley reading his poems in the basement of the Butchery, Helen Ivory and Martin Figura’s home after his reading the previous evening for Café Writers Norwich. On viewing the subterranean footage, Astley decided that a black and white treatment was necessary, one which was nevertheless in keeping with Wrigley’s author photographs, which are always Old West monochrome. This film is from the DVD-anthology IN PERSON: WORLD POETS, filmed and edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). For more details please see bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-church-of-omnivorous-light-1061
