Luminous new poems from one who "has long been a poet of gorgeous description" —William Logan, The New Criterion Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation. Don't just do something, sit there. And so I have, so I have, the seasons curling around me like smoke, Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound. —from "Body and Soul II" This is Charles Wright's first collection of verse since the gathering, in Negative Blue , of his "Appalachian Book of the Dead," a trilogy of trilogies hailed "among the great long poems of the century" (James Longenbach, Boston Review ). In A Short History of the Shadow , Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.