[Longenbach teaches at the University of Rochester. In the following review, he praises Black Zodiac and compares the collection to Wright's overall body of work.]

Almost thirty years ago, Charles Wright began a poetic project of astonishing scope. A trilogy of books, later winnowed and collected in Country Music (1982), offers a highly compressed autobiography, tracing Wright's spiritual journey from the soil to the stars. In the next three books, gathered with a coda in The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990), Wright adopts more wayward structures, his long lines reaching in countless directions at once. Read in its entirety. The World of the Ten Thousand Things seems to me one of the great American long poems—a lovingly detailed survey of our world that is also a visionary map of the world beyond. "Out of our own mouths we are sentenced," says Wright at the end of this journey, "we who put our trust in visible things."

With the publication of Black Zodiac, however, The World of the Ten Thousand Things is revealed as merely the second installment in Wright's lifelong project; a third trilogy is under way. In Chickamauga, published two years ago and awarded the 1996 Lenore Marshall Prize, Wright returned to short poems, eschewing the open-ended poetic "journals" with which he concluded The World of the Ten Thousand Things. This haunted, elegiac book could not have been more beautiful, but Wright worried in poems like "Looking Again at What Looked At for Seventeen Years" if he was doomed merely to repeat himself. That worry now seems strategic. While the poems of Chickamauga look backward, the poems of Black Zodiac begin the even more difficult task of looking forward, anticipating the paradiso with which Wright's trilogy of trilogies will no doubt conclude. Black Zodiac is the synthesis of Wright's contrary drives toward waywardness and compression, the soil and the stars. It is also his most richly satisfying single book.

By his own admission, Wright has focused on three subjects for the past thirty years: language, landscape and the idea of God. Wright's sensibility is always speculative and never prophetic, however, and though his poems are drenched in spiritual longing, they seem resolutely secular as well. Whenever he approaches the brink of hushed wisdom—"The meat of the sacrament is invisible meat and a ghostly substance"—he pulls back with a crisp aside: "I'll say." In the final lines of "Lives of the Saints," Wright is even willing to play the part of God's straight man:

      The afternoon says, life's a loose knot in a short rope.
      The afternoon says,
                         show me your hands,
                           show me your feet.
      The lives of the saints become our lives.
      God says, watch your back.

Wright is a poet of jeweled surfaces, but he is always irreverent and often funny—not in spite of the spiritual longing but in service of it. His ironic asides and (more potently) his artfully mixed metaphors remind us that any statement about the transcendental world is provisional and incomplete; there is nothing sanctimonious about a poet who writes of "eucharistic side-bars" or "the patron saint of What-Goes-Down." In "Disjecta Membra," the magnificent sequence with which Black Zodiac concludes, Wright whispers homilies to himself: "Simplify, open the emptiness, divest—/ The trees do, each year milking their veins / Down, letting the darkness drip in." Here, the long line breaks and drops down, ending with the metaphorical kick that is Wright's signature: "I.V. from the infinite." This metaphor—earthy, unpredictable, a little off—allows us to take the poem's wisdom more seriously. Wright sustains the largest ambitions by attending to minutiae.

"Whatever it was I had to say," Wright admits, "I've said two times, and then a third." This fear of repeating himself is linked to a dread of routine—the dailiness of work and the decay of the sexual body. "How soon we come to road's end," begins "Apologia Pro Vita Sua," the sequence that opens the book. But if the poems of Black Zodiac are as elegiac as those of Chickamauga, they more often register a sharp dissatisfaction with their autumnal hues: "I'm sick and tired of my own complaints," Wright continues, "This quick flick like a compass foot through the testicle." The whole wish of Black Zodiac is to discover a viable sense of the future without denying that we are doomed to repeat the past: "Mine is a brief voice, a still, brief voice / Unsubject to change or the will to change—/ might it be restrung and rearranged."

The possibility of change depends on what Wright calls "celestial similes" or "the slow dream of metaphor": Wright's style is the arc of his own salvation. "Umbrian Dreams" begins in his backyard. And though the poem insists that this landscape is somehow inadequate, Wright's extraordinary way of evoking the landscape—his endless supply of fresh metaphors—cannot help making it magical:

    Nothing is flat-lit and tabula rasaed in Charlottesville,
    Umbrian sackcloth,
                stigmata and Stabat mater,
    A sleep and a death away,
    Night, and a sleep and a death away—
    Light's frost-fired and Byzantine here,
                             aureate, beehived,
    Falling in Heraclitean streams
    Through my neighbor's maple trees.
    There's nothing medieval and two-dimensional in our town,
    October in full drag, Mycenaean masked and golden lobed.

Wright says that he will "dream" a landscape to replace the one he sees, but the poem has already given us another world—"frost-fired," "beehived," "golden lobed." Lost in ennui, Wright discovers that he is responsible for the way out: A future exists only if he can imagine a language for it.

This struggle to find the language is what makes the experience of Black Zodiac so particularly satisfying. The book's best poems are sequences of middle length—wayward enough to allow for repeated meditations on a given landscape, compressed enough to give those repetitions momentum and design. In "Disjecta Membra" Wright once again sticks to his own backyard: "It's Sunday again." The routine feels burdensome at first, but Wright persists, testing and discarding various metaphors for what he sees. Sometimes he can't find the language: "My shadow sticks to the trees' shadow. / There is no simile for this." At other times, he anticipates our impatience with his outlandish figures of speech: "Okay, I'll keep my mouth shut and my eyes fast on the bare limbs of the fruit trees." Every now and again, he gets something right:

     Life is a sore gain, no word, no world.
     Eternity drips away, inch by inch, inside us,
     December blitzing our blind side,
                white-tongued and anxious.
 
     That's it. Something licks us up.

Wright lets us feel the drama of discovery here ("That's it"), language and landscape clicking into place. His discoveries never harden into certainties, however: Like Cézanne painting Mt. St. Victoire over and over again, Wright puts his successes as well as his failures behind him, certain only that he "must bite hard into the 21st century." In the penultimate section of "Disjecta Membra," Wright offers an extended metaphor for the process of the poem itself: "Is this the life we long for," he asks,

         to be at ease in the natural world,
   Blue rise of Blue Ridge
   Indented and absolute through the
     January oak limbs,
   Turkey buzzard at work on road-kill opossum, up
   And flapping each time
   A car passes and coming back
         huge and unfolded, a black bed sheet,
   Crows fierce but out of focus high up in the ash tree,
   Afternoon light from stage left
   Low and listless, little birds
   Darting soundlessly back and forth, hush, hush?
                    Well, yes, I think so.

However much Wright yearns for the language of transcendence, his final allegiance is to the physical world. Even if a poet's job is, like the turkey buzzard's, merely to feed on the world's dead body, Wright will return persistently for more.

Black Zodiac is meticulously designed to embody this struggle, beginning with a string of memories in "Apologia Pro Vita Sua" and ending with glimmers of the future in "Disjecta Membra." Within this progression, companion poems such as "Lives of the Artists" and "Lives of the Saints" appear as mirror images of each other. And within these poems, Wright counts everything. "Apologia Pro Vita Sua" is divided into three parts: each part has nine sections, each section contains nine lines and a concluding "Envoi" has nine three-line stanzas—one line for each of the preceding twenty-seven sections. Such numerology is merely the framework on which Wright's endless variations are strung, however; the poems never feel static, and even if they feel dialectical, they do not arrive at clear moments of synthesis. Sometimes words are wholly adequate to the task of animating the world; sometimes only silence will do. At one moment, the landscape appears as a vision of spiritual plenitude; at the next, it feels empty and blank.

Instead of progressing from the soil to the stars, Black Zodiac hovers between alternatives, and we feel the daily work of discovery—the rehabilitation of routine. The words "up" and "down" recur in poem after poem, describing the movement of the sun, the landscape, the presence of God or the everyday act of moving the weary body through the world. "The Unknown Master of the Pure Poem walks nightly among his roses," says Wright, smiling at his own cosmic aspirations: "Every so often he sits down. Every so often he stands back up." In deadpan lines like these, the fluctuations of Wright's spiritual quest (up and down) are embodied in his strategic use of a matter-of-fact diction and tone: Like the body, the language of poetry is capable of rising because it also falls.

Black Zodiac occupies the position in Wright's career that The Auroras of Autumn holds in Wallace Slevens's: Having long since mastered his characteristic voice, the poet has passed through the terrifying moment when mastery threatens to become mannerism, and he has emerged as a poet whose every line seems completely recognizable and at the same time utterly fresh. In the final section of "Disjecta Membra," Wright remembers his father-in-law's advice: "Take a loose rein and a deep seal, John, my father-in-law, would say / To someone starting out on a long journey."

    I'm emptied, ready to go. Again
    I tell myself what I've told myself for almost thirty years—
    Listen to John, do what the clouds do.

These are the final lines in Black Zodiac, but Wright is not interested in ending. However accomplished the book may be, it is part of the larger project of living and writing—not a pinnacle to be admired but a plateau from which Wright sets out again. Again: The very word that dogged him at the outset of "Disjecta Membra" has become the emblem of his fortitude. After almost thirty years, Wright's journey is still beginning.