Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Helen Vendler (review date 7 August 1995)

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Helen Vendler (review date 7 August 1995)

SOURCE: “The Nothing That Is,” in New Republic, August 7, 1995, pp. 42-5.

[In the following review, Vendler offers a positive evaluation of Chickamauga. Vendler contends that Wright's “eschatological” poems are rich with striking imagery and lyric meditations on life, death, and poetic representation.]

The title poem of Charles Wright's new book [Chickamauga] doesn't mention the Civil War battle of Chickamauga or the soldiers who died in it, and in this it is typical of Wright's practice. The poem climbs to a vantage point where the anonymity of history has blanked out the details. What is left is the distillate: that something happened at this place, that its legacy of uneasiness inhabits the collective psyche (Wright was born in Tennessee), that it will not let us go and demands a response. A confessional poet might write about his own family's legacy from the war. A...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. David St. John (review date Spring 1982)
   2. Peter Stitt (review date Spring 1982)
   3. Joel Conarroe (review date 27 June 1982)
   4. Calvin Bedient (review date Spring-Summer 1982)
   5. Steven Gould Axelrod (review date Winter 1983)
   6. Elizabeth Frank (review date 7 April 1984)
   7. Washington Post Book World (review date 20 May 1984)
   8. Peter Stitt (essay date Summer 1984)
   9. Clayton Eshleman (review date 19 August 1984)
   10. Phoebe Pettingell (review date 20 August 1984)
   11. Helen Vendler (essay date 1988)
   12. Charles Wright with J. D. McClatchy (interview date Winter 1989)
   13. Linda Gregerson (review date December 1989)
   14. Nance Van Winckel (review date Spring 1990)
   15. Calvin Bedient (review date January 1991)
   16. J. D. McClatchy (review date August 1991)
   17. Stephen Unsino (review date 25 April 1992)
   18. X. J. Kennedy (review date March 1993)
   19. Helen Vendler (review date 7 August 1995)
   20. James Longenbach (review date October 1995)
   21. David Mason (review date Spring 1996)
   22. David Baker (review date April 1996)
   23. Calvin Bedient (review date Summer 1996)
   24. William Pratt (review date Autumn 1996)
   25. Calvin Bedient (review date Winter 1997)
   26. Judith Kitchen (review date Summer 1997)
   27. Christopher R. Miller (essay date Summer 1998)
   28. David Wojahn (review date Summer-Fall 1998)
   29. Zoë Ingalls (essay date 18 September 1998)
   30. William Logan (review date 10 January 1999)
   31. Kate Daniels (review date Summer 1999)
   32. J. D. McClatchy (essay date October-November 1999)
   33. Charles Wright with Ted Genoways (interview date Spring 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright