The Guide Signs: Book One and Book Two

In The Guide Signs, acclaimed poet Jay Wright closes a movement he opened with his first book, The Homecoming Singer, in 1971, a movement that takes its design from the ancient people of Mali. Wright continued this theme in subsequent works, gathered in Transfigurations: Collected Poems (2000), whose eight books represent the eight master signs. The two new books of The Guide Signs represent the primordial Nommo twins. All together, these ten books, as the ten earlier signs taken from the “complete signs of the world,” provide the base for the soul and life force given to everything. Wright encourages the reader to participate in weaving the fragile and fragmentary fabric of experience, and to do what Horace Silver encourages his listeners to do—“get down in the music with us.”

Poet and playwright Jay Wright has received numerous awards, including a 2000 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2005 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and the 62nd Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. A MacArthur Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Wright lives in Vermont.