Wright is … a thoroughly professional poet, and he writes the off-real journal entry, the shadowy song of rural experience, which is the characteristic magazine poem of our time. His technique, the over-all look and feel of his poems, come from Pound: the lines always hang nicely, and do their wire-walk quietly, without appearing to show off. The local texture, however, is echt-1970s. Here are middle-period Justice ("I open the phone book, and look for my adolescence. / How easy the past is—"), and Merwin ("The banked candles the color of fresh bone, / Smoke rising from the chimneys beyond the beyond, / Nightfires, your next address …"—which sounds New Yorker-ish, and when you look it up, it is), and James Wright's hammock poem ("Green apples, a stained quilt, / The black clock of the heavens reset in the future tense. / Salvation's a simple thing"). Charles Wright would be more intriguing if he found it not so fine a thing to relax into each inexpensive but portentous phrase as it rose to his mind and fell from his pen.

His reliance on phrases makes him seem, probably the last thing he wants to seem, fluent: "necktie of ice," "sleeves of bone"—these from different poems—and on a grander scale, "Daylight spoons out its cream-of-wheat," "God is the sleight-of-hand in the fireweed," "Heaven, that stray dog, eats on the run and keeps moving."… Wright sometimes thinks of himself as a Tiger of Instruction. Let us wish him a swift recovery from the illusion that anything very edifying can be made of the paradox. In the meantime, faced with so ripe a specimen of our current poetic diction as

  Each night, in its handful of sleep, the mimosa blooms.
  Each night the future forgives.
  Inside us, albino roots are starting to take hold,

the Socrato-Philistine who lurks in every reader will leap unembarrassed to the offensive, one sally for each line: (1) Why "handful," where the image is lost in the time it takes to think out the wit? (2) How do you know? (3) Oh, ick!

At his best, Wright deserves something better than the flippancy that is the healthy response to his easy jockeying for effect. [China Trace] has a few passages of tenderness and manly reserve, very close to Whitman in spirit and in sound…. The step-down to "enact" exhalation is mannered, and could simply have been a new line; but it is the Pound and not the Socrato-Philistine in every reader who says this…. And even when Wright is unforgivably slick, his cadences are measured and sure. Anyone who can imagine how this might be so, should inspect once again the emotionally ugly passages that have been quoted, and listen to the way they move. Wright's most impressive work has been appearing lately in the magazines and was evidently written after China Trace. We may come to regard him after all as a good poet who educated himself in public. (pp. 169-71)