Charles Wright

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John N. Morris

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In the following essay, John N. Morris examines Charles Wright's Bloodlines, suggesting it is less cohesive than his earlier work Hard Freight, while highlighting Wright's continued exploration of themes like identity and history, his complex iconography, and his nuanced departure from Christian consolation towards a naturalistic worldview.

Charles Wright's books seem to be coming fast now, perhaps too fast: in 1973 Hard Freight and here, early in 1975, Bloodlines. I think it has to be said that Bloodlines is not quite so sustained a performance as Hard Freight was …, and perhaps the reader new to Wright should begin with that earlier elegy upon and qualified celebration of "The infinite rectitude / Of all that is past," that series of forward journeys backward "always into the earth." In Bloodlines, to be sure, much is much the same, as in the phrase "the clouds, those mansions of nothingness," which so clearly remembers "The clouds, great piles of oblivion." And I seem to recall from both The Grave of the Right Hand (his first book) and Hard Freight the largely mystifying private iconography of shoes, gloves, hats and hands that one encounters here. Indeed, not only in particular but in general, the manner here is much as before (and nothing wrong with that), a matter of making connections that are bizarre and appropriate at once.

Though I think that in Bloodlines Wright cares a little less than he used to do that that appropriateness be (however mysterious) immediately apparent. It seems sometimes that his devices leave us a little too much to our own. But this is quibbling. The pleasure this book affords has much to do with Wright's old clarities and graces…. (p. 453)

I confess that I was at first put off by both ["Skins" and "Tattoos," the principal] sequences. As they stand there on the page, the "Tattoos" group look a lot like Berryman "Dreamsongs"; and the "Skins" series not only looks like, but is, a set of loose, unrhymed, sort-of sonnets, as in Lowell's Notebooks or History or whatever it is next to be called. These appearances are appearances only: like skins, they are superficial, though maybe, like tattoos, they're intentional. But at first glance the resemblances suggested to me that here was nothing more than another mechanical effort, and a derivative one, to solve the problem that The Long Poem (or even the longish poem) poses these days: if you can't build a building, try a picket fence (or a chain link fence, as in the title of a shorter sequence of Wright's that I'm not considering here). Not so—or not entirely so. But though those resemblances are chiefly external, "Tattoos" is full of dreams and visions and full, too, of autobiography and Experience, accounts of the infringements, the imprints of the world or worlds upon a self. And "Skins" makes a kind of reach after History, the history not of the autobiographical I of "Tattoos" but of you—i.e., Wright and us—who, having reached "that moment / When what you are is what you will be," must struggle on in the face of limitation and mortality.

Among the interesting things about these poems is how reluctantly they forego the consolations of Christianity. I take it that the difficulty and the necessity of doing so are the leading concerns of the "Skins" sequence and indeed of the book at large. This may seem, in so bald a statement of it, a desperately old-fashioned business. And the conclusion reached, a submission to the natural, is something we may have heard of before … (at moments in the book certain of Dylan Thomas' poems seem to be speaking again). But how many discoveries are there to be made in this department of life? In the process of attaining to [a sort of] religion of process—in, say, poem 15 through 19 of "Skins," a meditation on the four elements—Wright secures our acquiescence in his poetic procedures. Surely that's enough. (pp. 453-55)

John N. Morris, in The Hudson Review (copyright © 1975 by The Hudson Review, Inc.; reprinted by permission), Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, Autumn, 1975.

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