Triple Crown: Three Crowns of Sonnets ***

THIS IS A GREAT BOOK! Jeff Wright has become the first human being to win the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont. Take that, Equines! He did it the poet’s way—he crowned himself with sonnets, and gifted them to the world. Reciprocate his generosity by reading with your whole body. And they’re off! Bob Holman Wright’s had always a surrealistic edge to his work combined with a clarity that puts him in a league all his own. Hal Sirowitz Jeffrey Cyphers Wright’s work is dazzling, befuddling, up and down, and impossible to crown, though he writes in the impossible form of the shattered Corona. His work is full of good humor, but it is also as wildly rumbling as the elephant in mourning. As archaeologists find new skulls, so Wright discovers impossible anamorphosis of poetry. The work seems to come out of Ted Berrigan’s sonnet sequences, then suddenly it seems to veer into all possible sequences, a globalism which is the point. Not to like these works is like rejecting New Orleans because it is full of pleasure. Everything seems to be packed in here, even oneself. But the self that you discover is strange and seems like nothing you had guessed as yourself before. We have just stepped on Mars by mechanics; Wright has been there for a long time by human means and refusing to clean up. “Between the mess and the message” and the mesa and the mismatch, there he lies. David Shapiro In Triple Crown, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright goes for the ultimate prize. He joins the ring for competition in one of the sport’s deadliest events—the sonnet sequence. “Look for me in the crosswalk smackdown,” he writes, aware of the pratfalls. First, the sonnet was declared dead, then alive, then surging. The “innocent euphoria” Wright achieves is not so innocent, but it is euphoric. From rock and roll (a critic’s perspective), to mythology as one’s contacts; from the allegorical to the historical to the legendary to the underknown, Wright’s places are sites of giddy invention, where the risk of collapse is justified by views from previously unscaled heights. In Triple Crown, Wright proves himself worthy of the title: poet-lover. Vincent Katz