Contemporary Literary Criticism | Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Elizabeth Frank (review date 7 April 1984)

Elizabeth Frank (review date 7 April 1984)

SOURCE: “The Middle of the Journey,” in The Nation, April 7, 1984, pp. 421-24.

[In the following review, Frank offers a positive evaluation of The Other Side of the River.]

Midcareer can be a precarious time for the accomplished poet. Manifest strengths need to be consolidated without slipping into habit or manner. The dangers of obligation to one's audience and past achievement line up against the pressures of having to find fresh things to say and new ways of saying them. Charles Wright, Robert Pinsky and Jon Anderson all have considerable bodies of work behind them; none is any longer young. Of the three, Wright and Pinsky are by far the more interesting, and face the midcareer perils with triumphant results. Wright's material is mostly rural and elegiac, Pinsky's urban and contemporary, but each puts memory to the uses of transfiguration and each does it the hard way—through art.

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