[In the following review, Eshleman offers an unfavorable assessment of The Other Side of the River.]

For the most part, the writing in Charles Wright's new book [The Other Side of the River] is languorous, nostalgic and flecked with puzzlements about the meaning of life. At best, he has a Whitmanian eye for landscape and botanical detail, and renders the names of the places and things that have touched him in the past.

However, the modest talent for “naming” is permeated with generalized commentary that rises like bubbles and disappears:

What is it about a known landscape
                    that tends to undo us,
That shuffles and picks us out
For terminal demarcation, the way a field of lupine
Seen in profusion deep in the timber
Suddenly seems to rise like a lavender ground fog
At noon?
What is it inside the imagination that keeps surprising us
At odd moments
                    when something is given back
We didn't know we had had
In solitude, spontaneously, and with great joy?

This is seductive writing, and the seduction lies in the way the observed lupine and its simile appear to register something about the speaker's experience. But the commentary surrounding the observation is arbitrary and a “poetic game” (especially in the last quoted line) makes the reader feel a sense of experiencing something when the speaker himself is unwilling or unable to make any real connections.

When the botany or rote place naming is absent, Wright's poetry is the following:

It's the linkage I'm talking about,
          and harmonies and structures
And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.
Something infinite behind everything appears,
                                        and then disappears.
It's all a matter of how
                              you narrow the surfaces.
It's all a matter of how you fit in the sky.

Or:

I want to sit by the bank of the river,
in the shade of the evergreen tree,
And look in the face of whatever,
the whatever that's waiting for me.

That “fit in the sky” or “the whatever that's waiting for me” is on the same level as the lyrics for “Blue Moon.” Dead language; this is language that has become so dislocated from an experiential context that there is only a faint, winning, sentiment left. It is language calculated to keep the reader blind to what is actually impinging upon him, language as sedation or “high,” in which vague sensations are titillated and immediately dismissed.

Charles Wright is one of a couple hundred creative writing program, teaching poets who, like successful businessmen, have identified a promotable product and its clientele. The product might be described as: “I did this, did that, and I'm very sensitive for having said so. You are sensitive too if you agree that I am sensitive; if you can imitate such sensitivity with a few twists of your own, others will feel the same about you.”

I am not criticizing poets for teaching, or would-be poets for being students. I am criticizing a generalized, materialistic, descriptive attitude. With the proliferation of university creative writing programs, and their need to graduate “poets” and provide them teaching jobs, such an attitude has become the standard by which most North American poetry is read and evaluated. The phrases are there, and they still carry the words that are counters for the human spirit. But such words are more part of the noise than a coordinate of intellect, sensation and intuition that can occasionally inform and challenge a reader with a vision of where and how we are.