Outtakes: Sestets

Outtakes: Sestets is the second artist/poet collaboration published by Sarabande Books. This book pairs a collection of Charles Wright’s unpublished sestets with images by artist Eric Appleby. The first word that comes to mind when reading this book is texture—in both the texture of landscape in Wright’s sestets and the close-up, abstract textures in Appleby’s images. The artwork works perfectly with the poetry—each are focused, minute, observations of shadow and light, life and death.

Outtakes: Sestets is the second artist/poet collaboration published by Sarabande Books. This book pairs a collection of Charles Wright’s unpublished sestets with images by artist Eric Appleby. The first word that comes to mind when reading this book is texture—in both the texture of landscape in Wright’s sestets and the close-up, abstract textures in Appleby’s images. The artwork works perfectly with the poetry—each are focused, minute, observations of shadow and light, life and death.

Wright’s sestets, like much of his earlier work, muse about death, the afterlife, and spirituality. In the first poem of the collection, “Posterity,” Wright claims, “one tries, like a new jacket, one’s absence on for size.” The absence, death, is alluded to again in “In the Beginning was the Word, in the End was the Word,” where Wright recounts his friend’s belief that “all the people will be in hell” and adds, “I know he’s right.” His outlook on death and the afterlife is grim, believing that “immortality’s for others, always for others” in “Looking Out the West-Facing Window” and, in “I’ll Plant My Feet on Higher Ground,” “the end, as sure as hell is, / is waiting for us,” though he prays, in “Little Prayer,” that “hell is no certainty.” The poems have a sense of foreboding, of pacing the floor, perhaps impatiently waiting the uncertain death that looms on the horizon.

Several of the poems, though void of the hope that the Bible proclaims, contain biblical references, with the stories of the disciple Thomas and Cain. Wright does not approach this as a believer but as an interested observer, sometimes borrowing the language of the King James Bible for his poems, such as in “I Know It Sounds Strange, But It Sounds Right To Me”: “virtue is like unto water” and “the virtuous does not know itself as virtuous.”

The poems also reveal Wright questioning his career as a poet. In “I Know It Sounds Strange,” the poem concludes with the line, “The great writer does not write.” In the following poem, “Autumn Thoughts, On the Night of Strand’s Book Party in New York City,” he questions himself: “I’ve written commentaries on the wind and moon for all these years. / And what kind of enterprise is that?” Another doubt surfaces at the end of “Lesson from Long Ago,” where “someone once said that writers abhor a worldly success.”

While I did find myself wishing, at times, for more explanation of the images—perhaps a title, or reference—the stark black and white, uncertainty of the artwork enhanced the reading of Wright’s sestets. The sestets are not as focused on nature as earlier work though they still carry on the spiritual themes, and this visually enticing book’s close observation leaves the reader with questions about death and the afterlife—questions that they should be asking.