When Charles Wright's poems work, which is most of the time, the poetic energies seem to break the membrane of syntax, exploding the surface, reverberating in multiple directions simultaneously. It is not a linear progression one finds but rather a ricocheting, as if, at the impact of a single cue, all the words bounced into their pockets, rearranged, and displaced themselves in different directions all over again. And it seems to happen almost by accident, as if Wright simply sets the words in motion and they, playing a game according to their own rules, write the poem. Certainly Wright is aware of this strange power of words; all three of his books contain poems which, strictly speaking, refer only to words and their maneuverings. (pp. 625-26)

        Oval, oval oval oval push pull push pull …
        Words unroll from our fingers.
        A splash of leaves through the windowpanes,
        A smell of tar from the streets:
        Apple, arrival, the railroad, shoe.
                                           (p. 626)

One reads a poem like "Tattoos 12" and the first response is "that felt good!"; and only later … "what happened?" Of course Wright's poems are not without "sense," not without conceptual-symbolic dimensions, but it is the sense of primal consciousness, the sense of paradox and multiplicity almost, one might say, a syntax of eroticism—that binds these words and their meanings. Or, to use Lacan's terminology, it is "the letter in the unconscious," which, though it may oppose conscious purpose, is never arbitrary…. So in the afterglow of the initial reading one can go back and, unwinding the words from their embrace, realize, for example, that the reason "oval oval oval oval" works so well with "push, pull" is that an oval is a circle which has been squeezed, "pushed," or elongated, "pulled," at two points, that oval is the transcendent ease of the perfect equilibrium of the circle being subjected to pressure. The oval is also an egg, birth, the push and pull of form coming into existence. And what do "apple, arrival, the railroad, shoe" have to do with each other? Is this just perverse eroticism at work again? No, there is meaning in the apparent madness. All the words are related to movement—the "apple" to the movement toward knowledge, the expulsion from grace, the fall into the limits of temporal existence and guilt. With "apple" in the first slot and "arrival, the railroad, shoe" functioning as substitutions thereafter, the series together carries meanings of movement-knowledge-guilt-limit with a progressive emphasis on limitation: "apple" signifying a transcendental causal function; "arrival," because it is used nonspecifically, signifying an abstract goal of movement; "railroad" reducing the abstract movement to a finite vehicle of movement; and "shoe" further restricting movement and the vehicle of movement. The limit-restriction element is both a reverberation back to and an amplification of the first line—that is, it amplifies the sense of stress of "oval" and "push, pull" and it extends the notion of imperfectness implied there. The movement-knowledge-guilt-limit motif is also evident in the second, third, and fourth lines: "windowpanes," suggesting consciousness itself which receives the knowledge, immediately becomes contaminated with the "smell of tar," black, sticky, clinging guilt. Further, all of these motifs get connected with the "meaning" of words: after the first line, which simply establishes a process, comes the first subject in the poem ("words") and all the subsequent subjects which follow must be seen as substitutions, replacements, which serve to multiply the significations connected with that first subject. So, the first stanza as well as the entire poem is about words, about the way they come to carry meaning, the dynamic that exists between words as signifiers and the things they signify, the guilt of words as opposed to the purity of silence. (p. 627)

Wright's power as a poet lies in [his] ability to hook us, to intoxicate us with a language that radiates paradox—that is, the realm of symbol. To accomplish this demands, I think, a kind of surrender on the part of the poet, a loosening of intent, a trusting in the mad sense of language. And, in fact, Wright's poetry fails when he refuses to surrender enough, when he holds the reins on the words too tightly, when he seems too intent upon getting an idea across and, ironically, ends up writing poems less rich in meaning. But when the right balance between abandon and control is achieved, the nature of the tension is erotic…. (p. 628)

The connective threads, the concepts, that run through Wright's poems and make his collection read, as James Tate puts it, "like a book not a miscellany," have to do with Wright's insistence that the human is but one system, one way of ordering, one center exerting its force while simultaneously being permeated by the force of other systems, that progress in terms of any single system is an illusion; the center is always shifting. There is simply process, displacement, the perpetual turning of transformation…. In each of his books, Wright has moved closer and closer to this radical level ["where all is a true turning, and all is growth"]: in his latest book, he situates himself, metaphorically, in the flux itself. It is the numen of the blood that Wright explores in Bloodlines, In "Virgo Descending." the first poem in the collection, Wright draws us directly into a transformative dissolution and leads us to an archetypal image of the blood, the high priestess of the irrational, chthonic forces—the Great Mother…. (pp. 628-29)

Significantly, in "Virgo Descending" there is no directive agent, no subject which initiates the action. Instead, there is simply process itself and various stages in this process; the grandmother image does not signify an end stage of the process but rather its final opening-out…. Wright takes us into a place where there are no stable subjects, only momentary foci or centers of action, where the "I" itself is a "something else" that is, subjectively, nothing because it is perpetually subject to change…. The release from stable identity to process brings with it a "release" from security. It is a willingness to accept a subjectless play of forces similar to the Oriental concept of Tao and Wright's insight is that as long as one yearns for a permanently fixed center, an arbitrary pattern not found within the flux, within the blood (blood lines) there will, ironically, be only emptiness…. (pp. 629-30)