The Other World of Richard Wright

The first scholarly consideration of the over eight hundred haiku written late in Wright's lifeEssays by: Shawnrece D. Campbell Lee Gurga Yoshinobu Hakutani Richard A. Iadonisi Toru Kiuchi Sanehide Kodama Thomas L. Morgan Sachi Nakachi Meta L. Schettler Jianqing ZhengThe Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku reveals Richard Wright's poetic vision toward the human world. Through the minimal form of haiku Wright (1908-1960) found his poetic connection to nature. This sensibility displays not only the change in him as a writer but also the tenderness in him as a human being.These essays open up a new territory in Wright studies by tracing the development of Wright's aesthetic and its relationship to African and Japanese cultures. The book tells how haiku offered a therapeutic outlet for Wright in his final two years of life in Paris explores the influence of Zen Buddhism on Wright's haiku and delivers a thematic analysis of Wright's haiku. The collection also gives us a focused examination of how Wright's haiku reveal a conflict between nature and culture how women are exploited for labor and sex by the culture at-large and how the South in Wright's haiku symbolizes a place full of dreams memories hardships and loneliness with his images of cotton freight trains croaking frogs magnolia trees and hog-killing.Jianqing Zheng Greenwood Mississippi is professor and chair of English at Mississippi Valley State University. He is the editor of Valley Voices: A Literary Review. A noted Wright scholar Zheng's work on the writer has appeared in the Explicator Southern Quarterly Modern Haiku Frogpond Notes on Contemporary Literature and other periodicals.