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If there is a Frank Lloyd Wright of contemporary poetry, it may be Robert Wrigley. Just as each of Wright's buildings is a unique expression of an organic aesthetic vision, Wrigley's poems are constructed from the material of their moment. And just as Wright's architecture depends on unity of site and structure, Wrigley's books present a marriage between a whole and its components.

But no matter how integrally Wrigley's poems balance music and meaning, he is no iconoclast in the Wright mold. “Poetry,” Wrigley says, “can have a redemptive function. It can look at the chaos you see and make a kind of sense of the smallest part of it.” From his earliest efforts to the mature work that has earned him an international reputation, Wrigley has consistently sought the redemptive in his poetry. His poems demonstrate the unity of generations divided by national crisis as adroitly as they suvey humankind in the natural world. And throughout, Wrigley's visions is sculpted from music and image pressed to their limits.

Wrigley has published seven collections of poems, including Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006), Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003), and Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999), which was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His book, In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995), earned the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wrigley directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho. He met with us over lunch at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane.