Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - William Pratt (review date Autumn 1996)


Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - William Pratt (review date Autumn 1996)

William Pratt (review date Autumn 1996)

SOURCE: A review of Chickamauga, in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 4, Autumn, 1996, p. 967.

[In the following review of Chickamauga, Pratt concludes that Wright's “poetry of sad wistfulness” is tantalizing and promising, though often succumbs to abstractions and stunted revelations.]

Here is a book of poems [Chickamauga] about the American Civil War, right? Wrong. Then what is it about? Aging and death, mostly, but also about places like Laguna Beach (“Seventeen years in Laguna Beach— / Month after month the same weather”), Venice (“Venice is death by drowning, everyone knows”), and Charlottesville (or was it Wallace Stevens who wrote “An Ordinary Afternoon in Charlottesville”?) And are these poems? Yes, if “the prose tradition in verse” still continues, as Ezra Pound insisted it should, and as Marianne Moore continued it, by writing what she said was...

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