Time will append us like suits left out overnight

On a deck chair, loose change dead weight in the right pocket,

Silk handkerchief limp with dew,

sleeves in a slow dance with the wind.

And love will kill us --

Love, and the winds from under the earth

that grind us to grain-out.

-- from "Still Life with Spring and Time to Burn"

When Charles Wright published Appalachia in 1998, it marked the completion of a nine-volume project, of which James Longenbach wrote in the Boston Review "Wright's trilogy of trilogies -- call it 'The Appalachian Book of the Dead' -- is sure to be counted among the great long poems of the century".

The first two of those trilogies were collected in Country Music (1982) and The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990). Negative Blue adds to his third trilogy (Chickamauga 1995 , Black Zodiac 1997 , and Appalachia 1998 ) a section of new poems that suggests new directions in the work of this sensuous, spirit-haunted poet. It is, as Dionisio D. Martinez wrote in The Miami Herald, "truly an event".