Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues

“Poetry is the language of intensity,” the poet C.D. Wright once wrote. “Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.” When I took a workshop with C.D. Wright in college I was frightened by her intensity. It was only years later, after her tragic and untimely death, that I discovered that I loved her work, and understood intensity as part of her poetics. It is the ruling logic of my favorite Wright book, her 1982 collection “Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues”-- now out of print and, luckily, available to read at our library. The collection is her third, and her first full-length work not published on Lost Roads, the press famously founded by Frank Stanford and helmed by Wright after his death. Though not as explicitly documentary in nature as some of her later works, the poetry of “Translations” is that of everyday utterances. These poems are sure-handed spells, stark and at times sardonic, as in the poem, “Obedience of the Corpse”: “She hopes the mother’ milk is good a while longer,/ The woman up the road is still nursing – but she remembers the neighbor/ And the dead woman never got along.” The perceptive knife with which she collages the world together is of unparalleled sharpness. Her poem “Falling Beasts” is, I think, one of the best and most instructive examples of the associative leap in contemporary poetry: “Girls marry young/ in towns in the mountains./ They’re sent to the garden/ For beets. They come to the table/ With their hair gleaming,/ Their breath missing./ In my book love is darker/ than cola. It can burn/ A hole clean through you.” The book brings no airs, down to its lack of notes, not a hint of sentimentality, at the back matter– only a curt biographical statement wherein she claims merely to have “earned a living in Arkansas, Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco as a teacher of writing, as a publisher, and at various less gratifying employment.” If you are a writer, I urge you to let it teach you her language– the language of intensity– whether you are lucky enough to stumble upon a copy, or would like to come on down to the library, and read it amidst our collection.