Contemporary Literary Criticism | Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Nance Van Winckel (review date Spring 1990)

Nance Van Winckel (review date Spring 1990)

SOURCE: “Charles Wright and the Landscape of the Lyric,” in New England Review, Vol. XII, No. 3, Spring, 1990, pp. 308-12.

[In the following review, Winckel offers a positive evaluation of Zone Journals.]

Part of the pleasure of a good lyric poem is the way it allows us to exist simultaneously in all time, not simply to transcend the present, but to pull fragments of past and present together into one charged moment. From the poems in his early collections (Hard Freight, Bloodlines) to the more recent (China Trace, The Other Side of the River, Zone Journals), Charles Wright's poems have moved toward a lyric presence able to enfold increasingly more and more layers of time, space, emotion. It's as if to accommodate the poet's past as it widens and lengthens behind him, the poetic voice has increasingly opened out to contain it more fully.

In Zone...

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