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."

And I will tell you
how I came rambling out of the snowy juniper
to arrive in a legacy of farolitos,
and the Dominican insistence on a proper

burial.
Three voices arise
, but perhaps only one will hisse, or chirpe,
whisper in the voyce of the Spirit,
and perhaps only one will know the Quire of Saints,
or enter the holy roome.
I will turn again
to that interruption that seeds me
in the sands of betrayal along the Niger,
and speak of the difficult birth of a mind

that measures its own transfiguration.
This will be the moment of letting go.

From "The Guide Signs: Book Two" published in The Guide Signs by Jay Wright.
Copyright © 2007 by Jay Wright. All rights reserved.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

"Jay Wright is one of the five or six living American poets whose work will survive."--Harold Bloom

112 pages, 6 x 9