Wright's epigraph for [China Trace], taken from T'u Lung, of the Ming dynasty, provides a key:

I would like to house my spirit within my body, to nourish my virtue by mildness, and to travel in ether by becoming a void. But I cannot do it yet…. And so, being unable to find peace within myself, I made use of the external surroundings to calm my spirit, and being unable to find delight within my heart, I borrowed a landscape to please it.

In the context of an Idealistic Neo-Confucianism, Wright's world becomes one of presences that are inadequate substitutes for the absence he desires. As a result, the objects of his landscape aspire to the condition of language, our substitute, if we can trust our linguistic critics … for what we cannot fully possess, for what is missing. In a roundabout way, he hopes language will bring him the void, will allow him to become, as another epigraph suggests, "an emblem among emblems." The poet's trick is thus to "mimic the tongues of green flame in the grass" ("Where Moth and Dust Doth Corrupt"). The irony of such a procedure is that language itself becomes ineffable: "In some other language, / I walk by the same river, the same vowels in my throat. / I wish I could say them now" ("Wishes"). And when the poet can speak, when he does write, the language becomes one of numerous signifiers whose significance is enigmatic. Though the consequence is often a poem inexcusably vague, or inaccessibly solipsistic, in many cases the metaphysical reality of absence is powerfully evoked…. This book is the third in a trilogy, and it is far more abstract than its predecessors; however, the world it explores is more rich, more mysterious, and the reality it often earns is rewarding. It will be interesting to see where Wright goes from here. (pp. 555-56)