Contemporary Literary Criticism | Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Linda Gregerson (review date December 1989)

Linda Gregerson (review date December 1989)

SOURCE: “Short Reviews,” in Poetry, Vol. CLV, No. 3, December, 1989, pp. 229-31.

[In the following review, Gregerson comments on Wright's themes and artistic aims in Zone Journals.]

The ten “journals” that constitute the body of this book [Zone Journals] make a single formal and epistemological case, a case that has long been emerging in the larger body of Wright's work. Their case is for immanence, the deferred material presence of truth; for permeability and open-endedness; for the liminal, where eschatology incorporates the risen body of the past; for rehearsal, which is the only performative mode of consequence; for the invocatory, which is the antithesis of the iconic. The rejection of closed form in these poems is by no means the rejection of the artifactual: in Wright's theatre of imagination the lineaments of human manufacture or poesis chronically bleed through the scrim...

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