Contemporary Literary Criticism | Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Christopher R. Miller (essay date Summer 1998)

Christopher R. Miller (essay date Summer 1998)

SOURCE: “Poetic Standard Time: The Zones of Charles Wright,” in Southern Review, Vol. 34, No. 3, Summer, 1998, pp. 566-86.

[In the following essay, Miller examines the development of Wright's aesthetic and philosophical concerns upon the publication of Black Zodiac and discusses the evolving technical style by which he approaches such themes in his poetry since the mid-1970s.]

In the first poem of Black Zodiac (1997), Charles Wright seems to bid farewell to an idea that has sustained most of his career. He has tried, he says, to “resuscitate” journal and landscape—“Discredited form, discredited subject matter”—to no avail. This declaration, from “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” may surprise readers who have come to know Wright through his strange territories of memory and experience: the hypertrophic green backdrops of his Tennessee youth; the Italian...

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