In 1977, Lost Roads Publishers, founded by Arkansas poet Frank Stanford, published as its first volume Wright’s poetry collection, Room Rented by a Single Woman. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1976 with a poetry thesis, Alla Breve Loving. Wright grew up in Boone County, graduated from Harrison High School, and received her BA in French from Memphis State University in 1971. Wright, a judge for the chancery and probate court. Wright was born on January 6, 1949, in Mountain Home (Baxter County) to Alyce E. Wright was a National Book Award finalist for her 2010 volume One With Others:, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award that year.Ĭ. As a publisher and an exhibit curator, she was a long-term advocate of poets and poetry. But Wright avoids overt didacticism.Carolyn Wright was a poet whose work won acclaim for its experimental variety and rich colloquial sound. For example, we are given detailed descriptions of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, set ominously next to scientific perspectives on beech bark disease. Yet Wright manages to convey the direness of the situation without sounding preachy. The other through-line is environmental, and concerns the possible extinction of the beech. On the one hand, we have Wright’s personal development of “tree consciousness.” The verses often read like a memoir, as the fragments progressively fill in segments of Wright’s life. Although the cascading tangents can feel arbitrary at times, there are two conductive threads that guide Wright’s “amble.” These acts of witnessing are by turns appalling (beeches along the Trail of Tears), intriguing (Celtic tree cults), and funny (the time Wright’s brother was told the warts on his hands came from frog urine). Throughout this collection, the poet uses the beech as a tool to bear witness herself - examining both personal and historical vistas. Wright knows the beech too closely to succumb to blasé Romanticism about the innocence of nature. The tree can also serve as a witness: “I think of a witness tree as one that stood its ground, when something happened, possibly something no human was meant to see.” Trees are artifacts, carrying with them visions of history - visions we may or may not wish to forget. The tree’s gentle aggression faces human brutality. The intimacy of preparing bread is pushed up against the violence of lynching. I have never heard it defamed as a hanging tree.
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