Charles Wright, who longs to elude his too-local life, eludes you even when he isn't trying. He's trying on the cover of his third volume, Bloodlines, where reflected lights (irregular white patches like blotches on an abstract canvas) hide the eyes behind his sunglasses (eyes you know are looking at you). Haloed by a washtub hung on a cabin wall, he's a mock frontier-saint of purity—washed in the beyond, cleaned to blankness, bouncing back brilliance.

Hard Freight (1973), Bloodlines (1975), China Trace (1977), and The Southern Cross (1981) perpetuate with a horizon-pale passion what Yeats called “the inspired condition.” Their often astonishingly beautiful lines seek to “pull that rib of pure light” that must still lie in language somewhere, it's such a solitary Adam. Not that Wright is occult: on the contrary, he would make the intangible stark. To him revelation came early and has remained unsparing: it is that the dead, who are superior to us, who know more and feel more, are always near us. He hails the superhuman, writes of death-in-life and life-in-death.

To get into touch with this mystery Wright goes by his ear, which is subtler than any conscious understanding. Disallowing mufflings, it is one of the great precisionist instruments in the contemporary arts. Reading Wright you sometimes feel like Sylvia Plath's heroine squatting in the cornucopia of a colossus' ear, out of the wind, your hours married to shadow, counting at night “the red stars and those of plum-color.”

It is all high church—reason's unease. You find yourself in somebody else's Let us pray. Liturgical rhythms, ritualistic repetitions, invocations, appeals for absolution abound. The four elements are everywhere, yet often in curious coalescences—as when “evening comes down / Its trellises one rose at a time.” Very beautiful, but not quite of our world. The technique continually relates back to the metaphysics of death-in-life and life-in-death. Oxymorons and other reversals proliferate. As in the small poem “Death”:

I take you as I take the moon rising,
Darkness, black moth the light burns up in.

This surprises at once with “I take you,” again with “moon rising,” again with “Darkness,” and still again, climactically, with “black moth the light burns up in”—yet all is poised in an assured stance. Like dolphins, a Wright poem rises and re-plunges line by line, invoking a vast inhuman beauty. All is “procedure and process,” “the one / Inalterable circulation.”

Where does one stand in a circulation? It all “comes to a point,” Wright said in the sequence “Skins” in Bloodlines—to this moment, this place. “It comes and it goes.” Yeats held the “point” argumentatively, Dylan Thomas elegiacally; Wright, like a reed, bends along the river's flow, half here, half extended into the future, at right angles to himself, whispering “into a different ear.” China Trace, particularly, pleads “for a second breath, / Great Wind, where everything's necessary / And everything rises,” but always he is the poet of a deferred vitality, no swordsman, unless wishes can cut through life. “A wing brushes my left hand, ~¹ but it's not my wing”—that is his piercingly deprived note. “The thing that is not left out always is what is missing,” he said in Hard Freight, thus reversing the cloth of existence, placing being unsoiled on the other side.

A Christian upbringing iced his roots, the deaths of many loved ones have chilled them further. “Some things stay cold to exist: dry ice and the maimed child, / My hands, the nighttime and deep water. My hands.” Wright is as one whose right to independent life was never ratified. Already in Kingsport, Tennessee, while sons danced “in their gold suits, / clapping their hands,” mothers and fathers filled “With dust-dolls their long boxes.” Guilt tries to coffin him up and ship him out before his time: “The crime is invisible / but it's there.” “Will Charles look on happiness in this life?” Not if he seeks a comfortable place to lie among the dust-dolls.

“I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear / Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.” Yes; mostly by using landscape as a “Ouija board.” In an interview in Quarterly West (Spring/Summer, 1981), Wright said:

Lenny Michaels once said, “The great ones always speak from the other side.” If that can be worked backwards, then you always try to talk from the other side. … that tends to be … the audience that I write to. When I write to myself, I'm writing to the landscape, and the landscape is a personification of the people on the other side. That would be my ideal audience. One writes for approval, in a strange way. And I'm trying to tell them that I understand and that I'm doing the best I can.

“… in a way,” he added, “I feel I'm speaking for them.” But at times he knows he's just “jump-cut and Captain Dog,” a child playing at being master, a fictitious character whose name could only be reversed to the superhuman on the other side. Meanwhile to appear to jump-cut from this side to the other one, in planes awry as Cézanne's, snicking into elsewhere, is his joy.

No one more medieval, more communal in his relation to the dead. In “Homage to Paul Cézanne” he says they “are with us to stay,” says each year they “grow less dead, and nudge / Close to the surface of all things,” says “They carry their colored threads and baskets of silk / To mend our clothes, making us look right.” They need us—“Sometimes they lie in our beds with their gloves off / And touch our bodies”; “At night, in the fish-light of the moon, the dead wear our white shirts / To stay warm. …” But how much greater is our need for them. Indeed, they are our soul—our sadness, and our awareness. Our creativity is of them, from them: “We spread them with palette knives in broad blocks and planes … / Blue and a blue and a breath.”

“I'm a nominal Pantheist,” Wright said in Quarterly West. At best nominal, for God to this poet is remote. Even “God is the metaphor for metaphor” misses the gap. So figures of speech weep like willow's fall. The parents will lie dormant until lips say “what the lips in the west say/ At evening”; only a “tomorrow” will start them “preening inside their graves, / A yearn for the natural hug, the quick kiss overhead.” The father, especially, is far—the farthest nearness. The starry sky is his domain:

I look up at the black bulge of the sky and its belt of stars,
And know I can answer to nothing in all that shine,
Desire being ash, and not remembered or brought back by the breath,
Scattered beneath the willow's fall, a figure of speech …

At the end of China Trace the yearning “I” of the book turns to an achieved “He.” Yes,

Look for him high in the flat black of the northern Pacific sky,
Released in his suit of lights,
                                                                                lifted and laid clear.

The son will be one with the father when he is all suit, all light, laid clear of flesh and desire.

Like a great white painting the Milky Way reflects Wright's varying postures of prayer (first in The Grave of the Right Hand, his apprentice volume). In “Spider Crystal Ascension” (in China Trace) it is a father-spider of terrible industry, patience, and beauty:

The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way, drifts on his web through the night sky
And looks down, waiting for us to ascend. …
At dawn he is still there, invisible, short of breath, mending his net.
All morning we look for the white face to rise from the lake like a tiny star.
And when it does, we lie back in our watery hair and rock.

This spider waits to devour us, to electrocute us (“juiced crystal”), and to redeem us (“crystal,” “net,” “ascend”). But we prefer the mother, the white imago that ascends from below, under-star and succorer—prefer to revert to the dreamy time of “watery hair.” Between the starry host-spider severely maintaining his system (Wright's father engineered dams for the TVA) and the cradling maternal lake, between guilt and atonement, chilling distance and intimate union, this poet's metaphysics “quarter and spin.”

“Spider Crystal Ascension” reveals his religious trust in metaphor, his flamey-icy otherness of figure and mind, and incidentally his recent skill at long lines descending like spiders on their own smoothly and rapidly played-out threads. Vitality of a kind, a “black hole” variety, there undoubtedly is. (Once compressed language “gets past a certain point,” Wright said in an interview in the Fall 1977 issue of Field, it “goes out the other side and … expands.”) The poetry stops your breath, questions it with its uncanny beauty. (How deaf it is to the tiny drum of the pulse. It races, races away.) China Trace is a loose-leaf arrangement of poems ringed on a constant refusal: “If something is due me still … I give it back.” But, flicked into the future like skip-stones of light, the poems fail to reach their goal. (“It's endless extinction,” Wright said to me in conversation. “Isn't it? But I hope I'm wrong.”)

The one-line poem “Bygones” epitomizes the book:

The rain has stopped falling asleep on its crystal stems.

Of course the stems are not genuine crystal, they collapse; and of course there was no great awakening, only nodding. The single long line is an attempt at an aesthetic crystal stem, from which, however, the wish to be “singled out” (“I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out”) explodes like a watery flower and dies.

China Trace temporarily exhausted Wright's desire “to be bruised by God.” Compression led to the need for expansion, the awesome hegemony of the “other side” to a renewal of interest (of search) in this one. Of course Wright will never be one to settle back in a wheelchair of earth, a metaphysical cripple like most other modern writers, his knees under a blanket of moths. His need for the dead is too fierce. But in The Southern Cross he discovers in his own natural affections a “loose Milky Way,” to quote from The Grave of the Right Hand, “Gathering stars as it swarms / Deeper into the west.”

“At 40, the apricot / Seems raised to a higher power, the fire ant and the weed.” Bachelard's question as to how much world one must retain in order to be accessible to transcendency can be reversed, since transcendency, like a slipcover, may make us more mindful of the world. And Wright, who schooled his ear in Pound, has never been unmindful of it. Compared to the language of other poets attuned to “aethereal rumors”—T. S. Eliot's, or W. S. Merwin's—Wright's has always been bush-fragrant, dirt-loose.

Yet The Southern Cross—the long title poem especially—evokes what for Wright is a new haunting, the myth of the garden of earthly delights. The volume taps earlier strata of the heart, the senses' memory, the primal forest of desire, before desire was ash. Although Wright unremittingly hankers for the “Away-From-Here,” at times it swings round to the past, as the hinter horizon. “How sweet the past is, no matter how wrong, or how sad”—have not Southerners been particularly quick to note this? “All things that are are lights,” Wright said in Hard Freight, addressing his infant son, Luke: “The foothills of Tennessee / The mountains of North Carolina, / … Hiwassee and Cherokee … / Brindle and sing in your blood.”

Still, the past is elusive and the title The Southern Cross (the constellation by that name cannot be seen even from the Southern United States) hints at its fabulousness. At the same time the title wittily characterizes a Southern upbringing: “The outline of 10 crosses,” Wright said in China Trace, “still dampens and stains my childhood.” Whether visible or invisible the past tugs at the long lines of the poem like a “kite at the end of its string.”

“Places swim up and sink back, and days do.” The poem observes no order, there can be no summing up in

Overlay after overlay tumbled and brought back,
As meaningless as the sea would be
                                                            if the sea could remember its waves …

The oceanic witlessness of random memory. The patternless observations of a lifetime. After “Gauze curtains blowing in and out of open windows all over the South” on to Garda, Venice, Laguna Beach, and other stations of the cross formed by the merciless right angle of time to space … the map gone.

“The landscape was always the best part.” For “Time is the villain in most tales, / And here, too,” and landscape is resistant to time: a bunched refusal. “Everything I can see knows just what to do, / Even the dragonfly, hanging like lapis lazuli in the sun”—whereas time is all hesitancy and regret, the slippery cement of wishing and remembering. As Bergson argued in Matter and Memory, the spirit is of time, not space, and memory is a spiritual activity. It tries to hold on but “The lime, electric green of the April sea ~ off Ischia / Is just a thumb-rub on the window glass between here and there. …”

Sick Narcissus, memory finds in memories metaphors of memory. Everywhere it lingers over its own likenesses. For instance, “The clouds over Bardolino dragging the sky for the dead / Bodies of those who refuse to rise”; Venice “sunk to her knees in her own reflection”; “the way that Pound walked ~ across San Marco / At passeggiata, as though with no one, ~ his eyes on the long ago”; “the bog lilies [extinguishing] their mellow lamps”; “a brute bumblebee working the clover tops”; “the faint notes of piano music back in the woods.”

“It's what we forget that defines us.” Again, “Things that divine us we never touch.” Deliverance thus lies in recollection. Yet

I can't remember enough.
How the hills, for instance, at dawn in Kingsport
In late December in 1962 were black
                                                            against a sky
The color of pale fish blood and water that ran to white
As I got ready to leave home for the 100th time,
My mother and father asleep,
                                                            my sister asleep,
Carter's Valley as dark as the inside of a bone
Below the ridge,
                                        the 1st knobs of the Great Smokies
Beginning to stick through the sunrise,
The hard pull of a semi making the grade up US 11W,
The cold with its metal teeth ticking against the window,
The long sigh of the screen door stop,
My headlights starting to disappear
                                                            in the day's new turning …
I'll never be able to.(2)

What, then, is “enough”? To live at all is to lose ground (“The lilacs begin to bleed / In their new sleep …”) and the only way to be defined, too divinely original to be subject, divined, is to push it all, every dispossession and dispersal of the soul, back to the beginning. Back to Pickwick Dam, which “was never the wind,” and which “waits to be rediscovered”:

Somewhere in all that network of rivers and roads and silt hills,
A city I'll never remember,
                                        its walls the color of pure light,
Lies in the August heat of 1935,
In Tennessee, the bottom land slowly becoming a lake.
It lies in a landscape that keeps my imprint
Forever,
                    and stays unchanged, and waits to be filled back in.
Someday I'll find it out
And enter my old outline as though for the 1st time,
And lie down, and tell no one.

“Lies,” “lie”—the refrain wants to give away the bravado. No matter, for the due repossession of original desire has been asserted with an irresistible passion and precision. To hold rewound in the hand, satiny and luxuriously self-bound, all that time had seized and run off with into the future would be the very apotheosis of narcissism. “And tell no one”; the life that can be told is not the eternal life.

If you focus on the content, the poem feels multiple and fragmented (“No trace of a story line”). Oceanic, it is not borne up but heavy. Only the conclusion lifts it at all, in a brilliant ploy of asseveration. Yet in another view the poem is the non-longing for which memory longs. There is no strife in it, no effort at internal logic, no suspense, no self-memory, and no self-division. “Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub,” comments Lao Tzu; “it is the center hole that makes it useful.” In what Yeats called the “deliberate self-delighting happiness” of style, its “still unexpended energy … after the immediate end has been accomplished,” in that self-completion, that prodigal self-reference, the poem itself provides (as all art does) a subtle model of joy. The form lays healing hands on the content and at length produces the small, emulative miracle of the close.

The five poems each entitled “Self Portrait” show almost a relenting toward “Charles,” that troublesome odd-end and superfluity. Not, of course, an acceptance: a dissatisfaction, an edginess as of a spinning coin, a coin of light for which no slot has ever been devised, marks all this poet's work, save for his early sequence on his son. But gone, at any rate, is the punishing note of “Eyes thumbed, lips like pieces of cut glass … the shot unmistakable. / Take it, and be glad.” Instead, we find

Charles on the Trevisan, night bridge
To the crystal, infinite alphabet of his past.
Charles on the San Trovaso, earmarked,
Holding the pages of a thrown-away book, dinghy the color of honey
Under the pine boughs, the water east-flowing.

“The wind will edit him soon enough,” he adds. “And why not?” Yet with that “crystal, infinite alphabet” the past draws him back. If he can lay his hands on it he can spell and spell in lasting blocks through which the sunlight must still be streaming. And the verbless poise of “Charles on the Trevisan, … Charles on the San Trovaso” weights the statements against the vagaries of the wind.

The trochaic tilt of these verbal photographs (enlarging on actual snapshots on his study wall) tells us that Wright is forward of those times, spilled out. While his eye marks a lastingness, his ear discovers an earliness. But back then, although already a book that life had read carefully enough to earmark, albeit essentially a throwaway, he had held on to the pages of a thrown-away book (as he has since held on to the snapshot) as if he himself wanted to last. The book was retained under enduring pines and in a dinghy the color of golden ripeness. The allusion is to Pound, who thought, then thought better, of throwing the proof sheets of A Lume Spento into the same canal. (Did Wright at that time feel like a book earmarked by Pound, whose ear his own had marked?) In homage to the master the end of the stanza catches the silken watermark of his phrasing—an homage that confirms the momentary anchoring in nostalgia.

All the same, not self-retrieval but self-purging is the project of the series: a sifting of the ashes for the indestructible, gold influences. The somewhat deceptive model is Francis Bacon's sequence of increasingly molten self-portraits. So “by the time you get to number five,” Wright said to me, “the self-portrait series that started out strictly about me—‘Someday they'll find me out, and my lavish hands,’ and so forth, which is the tip-off to how to find me by the time you get to number five—is completely altered, I trust.” But Wright's image does not so much deliquesce as become an impure transparency: he himself is nothing, “Just red in the sky before the sun rises.”

Even the first portrait, which Wright described as “fairly straightforward,” is about his sense of indefiniteness and dispersal: “My features are sketched with black ink in a slow drag through the sky, / Waiting to be filled in.” It closes with an appeal to his gift to define him: “Hand that lifted me once, lift me again, / Sort me and flesh me out, fix my eyes.” But this sorting proves a kind of defleshing: “Angel of Mercy,” he pleads by the fifth poem, “strip me down.”

In the second and third poems he checks the “postcards and photographs” on his study walls for “evidence” (the third, quoting from Dickinson's letters, begins: “The pictures in the air have few visitors”). “Evidence,” does he mean, of a crime? Have his “lavish” hands squandered too much, including others' words? Has he been wrong to pretend to be a source, he, a mere cloud-source, melting, derivative? The crisis of his existence: doubt of its separate validity.

Small wonder if in the fourth poem he first disappears into “place names in Italy.” But then, returning to the scene of his crime, he is caught out when he names poets who “become places I've been to”—Dino Campana, Rimbaud, Hart Crane, and Dickinson.³ (Combining place and art, Cézanne's The Black Chateau concludes the catalogue.) Now the jig is up and in the last poem he pleads—he proves—unable to help himself. The three stanzas “have nothing to do with each other, other than having something to do with me.” But he cannot hide in such a scatter. The first speaks of a “ghost-weight” that pinned him to a bed where two women had once been murdered—the dead proving once again more substantial than he. The second quotes from Donne, the third from Dickinson. “Donne and Dickinson are ghost-weights on your tongue?” “Yes.” “Are you afraid that when you're found out you'll turn out to be other poets?” “We're all other poets. You're what you read, to a certain extent.”

In all, a series remarkably original and subtle (and expectably elusive)—but then to begin to appreciate Wright is to expect nothing less from his oddly sorting, unfleshing hand. The originality, subtlety, and elusiveness alike lie in strategies of self-deliverance—skirling metaphorical substitutions and metonymies, dizzying jump-cuts, twists of oxymoron and parataxis.

In keeping with all this the poet goes one better and shuffles his series of self-portraits together with a counter series on death as a birth out of the self. (“After the first death, there is no other,” as Wright's Vitalist parent, Dylan Thomas, instructed.) So “Mount Caribou at Night” finds “everything flowing and folding back / And starting again”; “Holy Thursday” sees “Children begin to move, an angle of phosphorescence / Along the ridge line”; “Virginia Reel” says

                                        … Just down the road, at Smithfield, the last of the apple blossoms
Fishtails to earth through the shot twilight,
A little vowel for the future, a signal from us to them …

and “Called Back” ends: “When the oak tree and the Easter grass have taken my body, / I'll start to count out my days, beginning at 1.”

The self-portraits concentrate on what weighed on Charles like evidence, the others on what Charles will one day fold back into (that day when the voices rising around him like mist and dew will no longer need to say, “it's all right, it's all right, it's all right …”). There is, then, in the intermingling of these groups an alternation (a “circulation”) between guilty individuation and the counter-fate of a glorious dispersal, albeit this antithesis is qualified by the way his pitiless, magnifying gaze reduces even his individuality to isolated, impersonal specks.

What is it that Wright wants, to deliver the self or to escape it by dying, whether literally or figuratively? To effect the first you must break with the parents. This Wright is unwilling to do. In “The Southern Cross,” to be sure, he erases them by going back to the starting point, the moment before the lungs first flapped with air. But at the cost, still, of infancy. That divine sinking in on the self—will he ever evoke it again? Distance from the self, star-distance, distance of “ashes and bits of char”; “spider love, under and rearranger of all things”—these are likely to remain his needs.

In the longest of the four divisions of the book (following “Homage to Paul Cézanne” and the section containing the self-portraits), Wright takes up a new technique for self-parting, one picked up from John Cage. At a concert Cage was asked, “What are you doing when you're up there fiddling with the score paper and twiddling your pencil?” Cage replied, “I'm giving myself instructions and carrying them out.” “I thought that was a pretty interesting answer,” Wright commented. “What I do in each one of these poems in the third section—and this should have no effect whatsoever on the reading—is give myself instructions and carry them out.”

“A complete contortion,” Wright said, explaining the title “Dog Yoga.” The instruction: no verbs. “Yet to make it look as though it's effortless. And it does smooth on down the page, I think.” It does:

A spring day in the weeds.
A thread of spittle across the sky, and a thread of ash.
Mournful cadences from the clouds.
Through the drives and the cypress beds,
                                                            25 years of sad news.
Mother of Thrushes, Our Lady of Crows,
Brief as a handkerchief,
                                        25 years of sad news …

And so on for 10 more lines and half-lines. And in the next poem, the reverse, “a verb in every line”:

At dawn the dove croons.
The hawk hangs over the field.
The liquidambar rinses its hundred hands.
And the light comes on in the pepper trees.
Under its flat surfaces horns and noises are starting up.
The dew drops begin to shrink …

This goes on for nine more lines, each ending in a period, an additional artifice, raising the factor of difficulty. Both poems sound right and, moreover, like Wright. His themes—“We are what we have always been,” “No sign of a story line,” and so forth—accommodate both verblessness and a poking parataxis that with a threadless needle stitches and stitches the ungatherable moments.

Handed such instructions, the muse becomes thoughtful, self-watchful—she must keep one step ahead of herself. (Of course she must always have her wits about her but the technique helps exact what Eliot called “the continual extinction of the personality.”) In “The Monastery at Vršac,” for instance, she has to break off narrating and observing and suddenly base the poem “on a statement (something you really shouldn't do),” then follow it immediately with “another statement that becomes a new foundation.” Nor can she decide in advance what the statements are going to be. She plays the game well—jump-cut and apogee are, after all, in her blood. It is only the initial narrative (“We've walked the grounds,” etc.) that manacles her. It has her stupefied with conversation and “brandy-colored light.”

Wright's turn for concentration amidst dispersal (for simultaneous being and not-being, hereness and thereness) assimilates the most difficult instructions. Take as a last example “Dead Color.” The instruction: “No bobbin on which the whole poem is wound.” This sounds anti-poem, but in a sense all Wright's poems are absences from themselves, the bobbin is always lost to the other side. (As he puts it in China Trace, “There's something I want to say, / But not here, stepped out and at large on the blurred hillside.”) Almost all his lines express a waiting, and waiting is the bobbin-by-default on which “Dead Color” is wound. “Between the grey spiders and the orange spiders, / No voice comes on the wind. …” “Meanwhile” the usual cycles (“The lawn sprinklers rise and fall”; “Aphids munch on the sweet meat of the lemon trees”); the usual entropy (“The traffic begins to thin”); the usual promises (“the heavens assemble their dark map”; “Over my head, star-pieces dip in their yellow scarves toward their black desire”). This poem with “no point of reference” is effectively about having none—an unmistakable “Charles Wright.”⁴

To all this esotericism of technique Wright's readers—such is the intention—remain a laity.⁵ It does not concern them, it is his affair, his askesis, his self-extrication, his evasion (and not only of his readers but of the fleshpots of his art). The instructions are the ghost intelligences of his text; they constitute a secret order. Substitutes for the parental dead (“I have the feeling that the dead always know more than I do”), they simulate the instructions that are always pouring in, coded, from the other side: the side at once author and arbiter, giver and receiver, the beginning and end of the circle on which the poet is invariably at a point of exile, both departing and arriving, too far from and too near the “great ones” to be more than their torturingly eloquent trace.

Yet, to repeat, this complex, philosophically splayed volume contains more spadefuls of what Patrick Kavanagh called “the earth's healthy reality” than any of Wright's earlier volumes do, and the most conspicuous sign of this is its warm naming of real people and places. I return again to the fourth self-portrait:

Marostica, Val di Ser. Bassano del Grappa.
Madonna del Ortolo. San Giorgio, arc and stone.
The foothills above the Piave.
Places and things that caught my eye, Walt,
In Italy. On foot, Great Cataloguer, some 20-odd years ago.
San Zeno and Caffe Dante. Catullus' seat.
Lake Garda. The Adige at Ponte Pietra
—I still walk there, a shimmer across the bridge on hot days,
The dust, for a little while, lying lightly along my sleeve …

However rapid, such naming is memory's sacrament. Charles, great cataloguer, is more passionately precise than Walt, who joyfully poured together the names of places that to him were more often signs than memories. Wright, too, chants, but at once more matter-of-factly and meticulously—memory getting it right.

At the same time the poet washes, as he said in Bloodlines, “in a water of odd names.” In the first place, the names are objectified by their music. “Cactus, the mustard plants and the corn”—always the masterful selection and disposition. Where Emerson's “Bulkely, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint” is (not undeliberately) cloddish and serial, Wright's “Woodburn and Cedar Hill, Smithfield, Auburn and North Hill” graciously drawls its geographical polyphony. Add to this the dulled romance of abstraction (the “other language” of “Wishes” in China Trace, in which the days are not “each nosed by the same dog”). Spiky “Marostica,” valiant “Val di Ser,” and so on, are freed from the capricious flux of phenomena, singled out by the strong light of the line. “Since I came to this abbey Hermit's Summons,” wrote Meng Chiao, Wright's ancient Chinese alter ego, “For a while the dust weights lightly on my cloak.” Wright's own hermitage consists of a shimmering bridge of names.

Another master example of this ritual naming is “Bar Giamaica, 1959–60”—a verbal variation on a photograph by Ugo Mulas tacked to Wright's study wall. It begins:

Grace is the focal point,
                                        the tip ends of her loosed hair
Like match fire in the back light,
Her hands in a “Here's the church …”
                                                            She's looking at Ugo Mulas,
Who's looking at us.
Ingrid is writing this all down, and glances up, and stares hard.
This still isn't clear.
I'm looking at Grace, and Goldstein and Borsuk and Dick Venezia
Are looking at me.
                                        Yola keeps reading her book.

And it closes:

Summer arrives, and winter;
                                        the snow falls and no one comes back
Ever again,
                    all of them gone through the star filter of memory,
With its small gravel and metal tables and passers-by …

By this point the reader himself is mourning—the brisk process of the poem having suddenly closed in a beautifully managed pathos. Already in the simile of the match fire the present surface of the photograph is virtually aflame. The sanctifying and preserving power of art is hinted at only by a “Here's the church” formed by hands with a merely social wish to entertain. The “See all the people” follows. Then it's gainsaid, but not before Wright has conceded far more plenitude than usual to the first category of nouns (to persons as against places and things).

Ugo Mulas himself is included perhaps as a kind of muse and as the nominal photographer of Wright's own real or invented group (when “Ugo finishes … everyone goes away”). In a sense Ugo makes use of the group, after the alien manner of artists, like Ingrid who “is writing this all down, and glances up and stares hard.” Yola's reading, like the poet's later study of the photograph, completes the circuit of art, closing it back into the common world from which, in part, it sprang.

But greater than this subplot is the social moment of grace (“Grace” is indeed the focal point) among confirmed and easy friends. The cat's cradle of their glances is described, the equal emphasis on the individual and the group managed, in glad allegro. The camera position shifts frequently and democratically, is freely and lightly dollying. The many-angled and any-angled technique bespeaks a friendly trust in the group, a social togetherness harmonious with individual differences (Yola reads, Ingrid writes, etc.).

But the poem has the further, elegiac purpose of rescuing the heterogeneous names—those already quoted and “the rest of them: Susan and Elena and Carl Glass, / And Thorp and Schimmel and Jim Gates, and Hobart and Schneeman”—from the still greater variance of dispersal and from the slow obliterations of time. It defies, before duly acknowledging, the snow that has fallen since that “afternoon in Milan in the late spring.” Yet, despite the face value of the photograph (the one that enables the present tense), Wright is of course unable to rescue the group from the sad fate of being outlasted by small gravel and metal tables and anonymous passers-by.

In “Bar Giamaica” the spidery movement attempts to evade time through lightness and rapidity. Increasingly Wright has avoided stanzas (“I don't like blocks in poems,” he said in the Field interview, “I like breathing space”). At his happiest he starts a flow that seems to circumvent time by escaping almost eagerly toward the freer future. He can run by a whole line of 17 or 19 syllables like a single ripple in the clear skin of a lake:

The early blooms on the honeysuckle shine like maggots after the rain …
          Now the wisteria tendrils extend themselves like swan's necks under Orion …
                    I hope the island of reeds is as far away as I think it is …

Overcoming the dread of space, the contemplating I with a sweet energy identifies with renewing or self-extending or distant forms. Using long lines or slipped-down half lines, or variable line lengths, or polysyndeton, or enjambed stanzas, all inspired by the demand for deliverance, Wright can initiate a flow almost at will. In “Mount Caribou at Night,” a poem about the first homesteaders in the region of Montana where the Wrights have a cabin, and about a final homestead in the universe itself, even the conservative appearance of the quatrains fails to dam the progress back to the inanimate—a progress itself, of course, profoundly conservative:

Everything on the move, everything flowing and folding back
And starting again,
Star-slick, the flaking and crusting duff at my feet,
Smoot and Runyan and August Binder
Still in the black pulse of the earth, cloud-gouache
Over the tree line, Mount Caribou
Massive and on the rise and taking it in. And taking it back
To the future we occupied, and will wake to again, ourselves
And our children's children snug in our monk's robes,
Pushing the cauly hoods back, ready to walk out
Into the same night and the meadow grass, in step and on time.

I find these lines, indeed most of the book, enchanting. Sweet and strange, nearly everything in it is mesmerizingly in language. One might expect many casualties where each line is a cast into the uncanny; one might even resist their absence, which is itself uncanny. And a few lines do seem randomly afloat on the surface—“One lissome cheek a notch in the noontide's leash,” for instance. But a very few. Wright's ear, again. … It is a highly developed, if peculiarly sensual, form of intelligence.

In addition to the hypnotic naming and the lithesome movement of the line and the absence of matte moments, there are graces of varying kinds. To begin with, telling metaphor: “The reindeer still file through the bronchial trees, / Holding their heads high”; “the brief and flushed / Fleshtones of memory.” Grimacing wit: “I've made my overtures to the Black Dog, and backed off.” Exact description: “Little runnels of boat wash slipping back from the granite slabs/ In front of Toio's, undulant ripples / Flattening out in small hisses, the oily rainbows regaining their loose shapes.” Firm placings:

                                        Angels
Are counting cadence, their skeletal songs
What the hymns say, the first page and the last.

August but plainly worded imaginings, as of his brother “Winter on top of the Matterhorn”:

Behind him, the summer Alps
Fall down and away, like hillocks of white on the noon sky
Hiding their crosses, keeping the story straight.

Dantean archaisms: “Venus breaks clear in the third heaven.” Imagist vividness: “Butterflies pump through the banked fires of late afternoon.” Calliopean bursts of vowels: “Canticles rise in spate from the bleeding heart.” And odd, compelling modulations:

And towns that we lived in once,
And who we were then, the roads we went back and forth on
Returning ahead of us like rime
In the moonlight's fall, and Jesus returning, and Stephen Martyr
And St. Paul of the Sword …

In addition, there are audacious oxymorons: “I'll rise from this tired body, a blood-knot of light, / Ready to take the darkness in”; “My poems … / Little tablets of salt rubbed smooth by the wind.” Frissons of the impossible stated, very simply, as possible: “And time to retrieve the yellow sunsuit and little shoes they took my picture in / in Knoxville, in 1938.” Vivid illustrations: “Language can do just so much … / Flash and a half-glint as the headlights pass. …” Stunning tableaus: “Death never entered [Li Po's] poems, but rowed, with its hair down, far out on the lake, / Laughing and looking up at the sky.” Unnerving interminglings: “mantis paws / Craning out of the new wisteria; fruit smears in the west …”; “This is a lip of snow and a lip of blood.” Above all the perfect pitch, the effect, always, of precision:

Thinking of Dante, I think of La Pia,
                                                            and Charles Martel
And Cacciaguida inside the great flower of Paradise,
And the thin stem of Purgatory
                                                            rooted in Hell.

In all, Wright is a spellbinder of the first order. Needless to stress, his world is not especially various (most poets' are not); his few moods brush up against little besides landscapes. Yet his lines glow with a peculiar blue fire, part dusk, part sacred enkindling. He is never less than an exquisite poet of yearning for something elsewhere, something purer; and to this ancient hope and complaint he brings a finely calculated originality, a refinement of sensual beauty, and an indomitable passion. The combination sets him high, I think, among the cold-quickened, cold-straitened artists of the age.

Notes

1. Here as throughout ~ indicates that the remaining portion of the line has been moved down a space in the text.

2. Although the verse is lovely and accomplished in its own way, there are echoes here of Theodore Roethke's “The Far Field.” The passage harks back through North American Sequence to Walt Whitman. Wright said to me, “I always thought that what I wanted to be was Walt Whitman in Emily Dickinson's house, but now what I see I really want to do is be Emily Dickinson on Walt Whitman's road—that is, to have his length of line and expansiveness of life gusto with her intelligence walking along, and her preoccupations, which are my preoccupations.”

3. The major influence, the Pound of the early Cantos, peeps out from behind the Italian place names.

4. Again, “Skins” had asserted that what “comes and … goes” nonetheless always “comes to a point.” But this positivity, this heroic “point,” is one that Wright's work, now lag-hearted, now leap-nerved, keeps missing or rejecting.

5. Secretiveness, writes Susan Sontag in her essay on Walter Benjamin, “Under the Sign of Saturn,” appears a necessity to the melancholic: “He has complex, often veiled relations with others.” Other Saturnine traits—among them the view of time as a “medium of constraint, inadequacy, repetition,” the compulsion “to convert time into space,” indecisiveness, a “self-conscious and unforgiving relation to the self”—are conspicuous in Wright's work.