Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Clayton Eshleman (review date 19 August 1984)


Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Clayton Eshleman (review date 19 August 1984)

Clayton Eshleman (review date 19 August 1984)

SOURCE: “Life as a Poetic Puzzlement,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 19, 1984, p. 7.

[In the following review, Eshleman offers an unfavorable assessment of The Other Side of the River.]

For the most part, the writing in Charles Wright's new book [The Other Side of the River] is languorous, nostalgic and flecked with puzzlements about the meaning of life. At best, he has a Whitmanian eye for landscape and botanical detail, and renders the names of the places and things that have touched him in the past.

However, the modest talent for “naming” is permeated with generalized commentary that rises like bubbles and disappears:

What is it about a known landscape
                    that tends to undo us,
That shuffles and picks us out
For terminal demarcation, the way a field of lupine
Seen in profusion deep in the timber
Suddenly seems to...

[The entire page is 641 words long]

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