Transfigurations: Collected Poems

‘A profoundly original, ambitious and globally minded writer… these dazzling, questing poems are always seeking to discover how a collective selfhood and identity might come into being’ Rebecca Tamás, Guardian

'A writer of serious intellectual depth' Jay Bernard

‘The greatest living American poet’ Dante Micheaux

For over half a century, Jay Wright’s poetry has been celebrated for its alertness to the multiplicity of human experience and identity.

Wright’s inexorable lyric voice, whose gravitational pull has an ‘indelible music’, transforms life into myth, body into spirit, image into icon, and ritual into collective consciousness. Revelling in the rich interplay between Native American, African American, Latin American, European and West African cultural forms, Wright detangles the threads of these complex historical forces to present a tapestry of the Atlantic World and the people who move within it.

Published for the first time in the UK, Transfigurations is the definitive volume that includes all of Wright’s 20th century poetry works - The Homecoming Singer (1971), Soothsayers and Omens (1976), Explications/Interpretations (1984), Dimensions of History (1976), The Double Invention of Komo (1980), Elaine's Book (1988), Boleros (1991), Transformations (1997).

Transfigurations is a singular opportunity for readers to fully immerse themselves in the sublime imagination of one of the most profound, generous and innovative American poets of all time.