Class of 2008
Honors Participant

Heather Simons

EXCERPT FROM
Step into the Center of Air:
Love and Death in the
Poetry of James Wright

"Perhaps the most heartrending American poet of the last half of the twentieth century, James Wright explored the deepest, and sometimes darkest, human feelings about love and death. The powerful human issues and emotions he confronted in his poetry depict a man haunted by the desire to understand his own experience in the world through personal poetic expression. . . . He approached the difficult subjects of love and death from a point of distinctively heightened sensitivity, searing his poetry with heartbreaking honesty, a beautiful and selfless invitation for his reader to enter into the turbulent mind and heart of the poet. Wright's is often the poetry of desperate longing or of hopeless despair; love and death weave in and out of his poems, the thin threads of larger mysteries that might never be solved."