Above the River" is 800 pages thick and has nearly 400 songs.
I read my favorite poetry collection this year.
James Wright, translator, university professor, and a poet who has experienced many nervous breakdowns and struggled with alcoholism all his life, made me understand that it turns out that just one or two lines are enough to carry the weight of the soul.
He writes about the small town of Martins Ferry by the Ohio River.
Write about the long shadow of the sunset standing in the twilight.
Write about the chestnut buds in April, a late frost falls.
Write a wet swan, unparalleled loneliness.
He writes about the bronze butterflies in the deep valleys, the leaves in the green shade.
Write about a place among the pine trees, the sun is getting thicker, and the twilight is thickening.
Write that the sun is falling over the pine forest, and the moon is shining on the lake.
Write about dwarf blue-leaved spruce and fat squirrels, rubber trees....
Countless times I have been poked by sentences in the book.
So light, floating, beautiful and nothing.
About breaking and mending, regret and sorrow.
About endless sadness and vulnerability.
About gratitude, apologies, and love.
It has been 44 years since he left this world, but these words are still rubbed into my heart along with love and hate, regret and right and wrong, to find the bitterness and anxiety that vaguely exist in me, to find loneliness and pure resonance.
He lived a life of tenderness with broken wine bottles, writing all the poems about the drunken and dull days, a pure and sincere heart between the lines, and was moved by it for a long time.
I wonder what an inexplicable feeling this is?!
But why do you feel gentle to the extreme?!!
Those romantic, pure, sad moments.
It's a reading experience I've never felt before.
It is advisable to read poetry in winter, and this book seems to be useless.
But we will need these useless but beautiful things.