Photo: Image Copyright Jim Champion.
A horse grazing...Images of horses appear throughout this set of poems.
Born in 1927 in the factory town of Martins Ferry, Ohio, to working class parents, James Wright was already an important, well-respected poet of largely formal verse when, in 1963, came his third book, The Branch Will Not Break, published by Wesleyan University Press. The experimental, largely free verse poems in this volume, with their startling leaps of imagination and deep, haunted images, shocked readers at the time and helped change American poetry.
On this extended web edition of The Poets Weave, I read more poems from The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright. The poems include “Today I Was So Happy,” “Snowstorm in the Midwest,” “A Blessing,” “Beginning,” “A Dream of Burial,” and “In Fear of Harvests.”
