Charles Wright

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Slide-Wheeling around the Curves

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SOURCE: “Slide-Wheeling around the Curves,” in Southern Review, Vol. 27, No. 1, January, 1991, pp. 221-34.

[In the following review of The World of Ten Thousand Things, Bedient analyzes perceived weaknesses in Wright's poetry from the 1980s. While praising Wright's uncommon ability to “pierce the skin of familiarity with rays of darkness,” Bedient contends that Wright's “journal” poems and subsequent writings lack the authority, focus, and provocative surrealism of his earlier work.]

After T. S. Eliot, Charles Wright has been the modern poet in English most afflicted and gifted by a sense of his own insufficiency before the absolute—that “black moth the light burns up in,” as he put it in “Death” in China Trace (1977). His sensibility itself has seemed like a gorgeous insect crippled on the windshield of the speeding galaxy. Through his startling figures and, if less so, his eloquent rhythms, he has intimated an unthinkable glory of which life is otherwise bereft.

Wright's work was, and more or less still is, melancholy. It closes the traditional accordion of poetic moods with a breath-gutting thwump. (For this reason, I think Wright deludes himself in Halflife: Improvisation and Interviews, 1977–87 in holding that his “poems are put together in tonal blocks, in tonal units that work off one another.” Even Sylvia Plath had a bigger tonal range than Wright.) More than most, this poet lacks immunity against the sadness of a separate, loose-ended existence. He even likes it: “November pares us like green apples circling under our skins”; “November's my favorite month” (“A Journal of English Days”).

Wright is unusually aware of the void over which the imagination performs like a hang-glider, riding the thermals of a buoying sadness. “Buoying” because sadness, after all, is not nothing: it is narcissism's minimal flying gear, its anorectic “I am.” Inconsolable but consoling, sadness is the shhh in the “eschatology of desire” (“Italian Days”). Still, Wright notes its sorry relativity vis-à-vis an inhuman grief:

Grief sits like a toad with its cheeks puffed,
Immovable, motionless, its tongue like a trick whip
Picking our sorrows off, our days and our happiness …

(“A Journal of the Year of the Ox”)

This grief sits in the “emptiness” that “is the beginning of all things” (“Roma II”). Sadness betrays it, but looks back lovingly while doing so.

There may be a big bolt of black cloth rolled up in everyone. Wright's singularity is to spread it out like a splendid fabric, make it flash what Denys l'Areopagite called God-by-negation, “rays of darkness.” A jubilant melancholiac, this poet—like every poet—leads a second life (it may feel like the only one) of figures, rhythms, and meanings, exalted and artificial, eloquent and to-be-continued. His imagination is the rufous spot on the throat of his hovering, stalled omnipotence, this last a residue of a not-quite-forgotten something that once seemed to guarantee a postponed triumph, a Charles “bruised by God, strung up in a strong light and singled out” (“Clear Night,” China Trace) or, less masochistically, “Refusing investiture in our pink rags” (“To Giacomo Leopardi in the Sky”). “Write” is the imperative concealed in “Wright,” for whom existence is wrong and writing the only way to right it. No matter how drag-heel in tone, his imagination, with its inventive verve, its athlete's skill in handling the ball of language, sets sadness aside, for the moment.

His arrogant warrant from Omnipotence—omnipotence being the flip side of melancholy—helps make Wright the American king of simile and its mugging accomplices, metaphor and personification. Simile is what he has instead of drama and narrative (though of late he has had sporadic anecdote. To perch on the dangerous rim where identities blur and collapse is his wicked delight. His figures are so many quasi-omnipotent toyings with difference and division. He joys in the “snick” (a most Wrightean word) of one thing winging like a knife to impale another. Struck home!

For instance, “Crows, like strings of black Christmas tree lights, burn in the bare trees” (“A Journal of English Days”) is a black-magic reversal, hinting that the white side of things is not the holier one. And “night comes walking across the lake on its hands” (“Italian Days”) gives us an upside-down acrobat Jesus of a night that is more than a trick yet piquantly unlike. Again: “His black shoes puddle beneath him / Like backs of mirrors he'll walk on tenderly” (“A Journal of English Days”). The brilliance of Wright's figuration is proportional to the blackness of the void that awaits him, that he at once fears and courts, reacts from and signals. He strikes two things together (e.g., crows and Christmas tree lights) to make an unexpected spark that would die immediately into an indistinction in which even God melts like a gaudy show, if only language behaved metaphysically, and not materially. The 10,000 things (a famous phrase from the I Ching) are a big stall; but by cross wiring two of them in the haughty night of the imagination, Wright would start himself on a journey to what is too sublime ever to be here.

Many of his figures raid the articulate. They are raptorial. A sizzling ephemeral fusional bliss (tiny imagistic imitation of the shrouded embrace of the hyperbolic past absolutized in the melancholy imagination) seems to be available to him at the least snap of his creative fingers. The unknown sits with its back turned, the simile is its switching tail. “What I know best is a little thing,” the poet says. “It sits on the far side of the simile, / The like that's like the like” (“California Dreaming”). Only through wrenchings, that is, figures, can the poet “imagine a mouth / Starting to open its blue lips / Inside me” (“The Southern Cross”).

But Wright's work of the 1980s has become increasingly ambivalent with respect to what in Halflife he calls “reminiscing about the future” at the expense of the past. More and more Wright shakes out sea-blue and forest-green and Italian gold and southern cotton materials together with the black satin of the unknown, in a rich confusion. In The World of the Ten Thousand Things—which collects The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), Zone Journals (1988), and the “apocrypha” of this last, Xionia, fifteen poems previously published only in a fine press edition—he multiplies himself in a most worldly way: into little Charles of Knoxville, Tennessee; Charles in military service (and during later sojourns) in Italy; blue-jeaned Charles in a cabin in northwestern Montana; Charles in a canyon-top home in Laguna Beach, California, with a liquid amber tree for an upraised finger and crows angling over the Pacific for edgy thoughts; Charles in Charlottesville, Virginia, awaiting the attack barrage of the thunder from the Blue Ridge (the Charles who dubbed his house Xionia because of its fake Ionian columns); and still others.

An atlased and scattered Charles, in sum, a Charles of reminiscence and nostalgia. A Charles, all the same, who has continued to be otherworldly, in spurts and in smolders. He has justified this two-timing in conundrums that will ruin your gray matter if you try to have at them: e.g., “I write an eschatological naturalism” (Halflife); “the textures of the world are an outline of the infinite” (“The Art of Poetry,” the Paris Review, Winter '89). He is now a hermit with the real sun nonetheless smeared on his face like egg yolk and now a nature poet for whom the Presence wears a robe of stained glass (“I'd be a Medievalist … purge my own floor”—“Lost Bodies”). In streaks or polka dots (white prayer on a blue field), this man of the cloths has chosen to have time and to eat it, too.

If he's now divided between the past and the (always metaphysical) future, at least these extremes lie on the same continuum of narcissism, by which I mean the necessary stickum of the sense of an identity. Like a short winter's day, time for Wright is dipped at both ends in the rich darkness of what cannot be possessed or exhausted. (It's the part in between, the naked look of now, that makes him grim.) The future is Charles “Released in his suit of lights, / lifted and laid clear” (as he put it magnificently in “Him” in China Trace). And the past? Charles no longer ticked off by the clock, nick by nick—at least that; Charles projected into the flashlights of memory. Both the past and the future, after all, exceed us, like poetry.

The trouble with reminiscence is that it drifts or stalls; it's spotty, fragmented, static, does not know how to be peremptory. A passive position; a depressive rut. The future is a goal, the past the night surrounding the flashlight beam of nostalgia. The past doesn't brace Wright's imagination the way the future does. For me, his turn to the past has meant some losses of structural intelligence and pressure, some drops in intensity.

Lately, Wright has become a rather polite author who tacks his work down correctly at all the corners. “Artifice, beauty and fear” (“A Journal of True Confessions”), these are still more or less his field, his forte, but he brings to them less authority than before (and what authority he can command!) and less concentration (ditto). The violent boldness of imagination in China Trace and still earlier work (Hard Freight, Bloodlines)—work that can be placed in the asteroid path of Trakl and Celan—has given way to an ironing style, smooth and again smooth, the half lines dropped to the right like the tip of the iron pressing down on the outer edge of an altar cloth, making it lie flat forever, in a warmed perfection. (Wright's own rationale for these “low riders” is that they allow him to use both sides of the page in a visual “structuring” of the poem in “space.” But the attention he lavishes on the line, together with his lack of any particular interest in “a whole,” has led to a problematical attenuation of form in his work, about which more later.) The aggressive similes (and those I quoted were from the “journal” poems) still snap like grasshoppers, but in a hotter and more ordinary atmosphere than before, the tone scuffing along in the comfortable dirt of what was.

The journal poems (battening on the quotidian in a way that would make any passing angels of otherness blush) combine description, speculation, anecdote, abstract questions, and melancholy complaints. It sometimes seems pretty aimless. Wright composes in “blocks,” such as the following:

—All morning the long-bellied, two-hitched drag trucks
Have ground down the mountainside
                                                            loaded with huge, cut stone
From two quarries being worked
Some miles up the slope. Rock-drilled and squared-off,
They make the brakes sing and the tires moan,
A music of sure contrition that troubles our ears
And shudders the farmhouse walls.
                                                            No one around here seems to know
Where the great loads go or what they are being used for.
But everyone suffers the music,
We all sway to the same tune
                                                            when the great stones pass by,
A weight that keeps us pressed to our chairs
And pushes our heads down, and slows our feet.

(“A Journal of the Year of the Ox”)

This is at once everyday and elegant, especially the surefire lineation, characteristically latticed, easy on the breath, the eye, and the ear. Indeed, these intimations of the ignorant heaviness of being are such a “sure” music that they fail to hurt: they're studied, and the conversational tone takes off their edge. (But, since “And pushes our heads down” seems consistent with being pressed to “chairs,” the phrase “and slows our feet,” which does not, follows awkwardly, perhaps not studied enough.) The passage isn't going anywhere in a poem that isn't going anywhere; you can't build with such blocks because they fail to conceal their indifference to anything but the moment. The memory poems and the journal poems, even when a distinction can be made, alike step into the sands of time.

In loosening the laconic cords binding his speech in his earlier work, in simultaneously pulling away, bit by bit, from his feisty surreal avant-gardism, in seeking a discursive normalization of Charles Wright, in strolling here and there on the loose-leaf autumn paths of the past, and in creating a spun-out linear style that's like a macramé of observation or remembrance, the poet may have retained some of his trapped and morose eloquence, so lambent and flame-away, but he has lost the drama of work that is broken as against the singleness that can be broken. “Better to choose for your love what you can't think,” he says toward the end of his longest poem, “A Journal of the Year of the Ox.” “The shorter the word, the more it serves the work of the spirit. / Tread it down fast, / have it all whole, not broken and not undone.” Of course, anything less than absolute will be broken—is already so; to sing to and of the unknown is to sing “in vain, / Like a face breaking up in the font of holy water” (“Three Poems for the New Year”). But in multiplying words, in elaborating sadness as Wright has done since the closing, title poem of The Southern Cross, he pulls a blind over the “window into Away-From-Here” (“Childhood,” China Trace). The motto “Speak the prime word and vanish”—a depressive / mystic's motto—sits oddly in a forty-seven page “journal.”

The disjointedness of the journal and memory poems is not the problem. Short as they are, the poems of China Trace are internally disjointed, at their wildest, without failing to be wholes. They skip like side-tossed stones until they disappear, but each flies and falls in a single direction, carving a fate-laden path. By contrast, the memory and journal poems are all over the place, and the mumped, centered dash that divides their sections might as well be a caution against their mutual contagion. The individual segments are not even contradictorily whole, like the China Trace poems, those hornets' nests hung high up in the isolating white of the page.

In his brilliant interview in the Paris Review, Wright tells of having made “an aesthetic” of disconsecutiveness and of wanting “An American sprawl of a poem,” “Epiphanic and oceanic at once. Intensive and extensive. The long and the short of it.” Unfortunately (good as it may sound in the abstract), this is indeed what he has made. What his accurate statement leaves out, quite rightly, is any rhetoric of wholeness aside from that couched in the term “poem.” When (as in Halflife) he does give himself to such rhetoric, the results are strained and give away (as I see it) his doubt that he's entitled to it. For instance,

Since the poem, “The Southern Cross,” I've been doing a kind of ghost graft: splicing real situations and incidents (language, even) onto an imaginary “tree” until the “tree,” by virtue of its appendages, has materialized into a whole, a recognizable thing.

Again:

Like Mallarmé (more or less) I want to hang in the center of myself like a sacred spider, radiating out, axle by silken axle, and then encircling it with a glittering wheel.

But trees built like Wright's ghost-grafted tree don't come into a single life, and spiders do not work by “radiating out”: they leap and leap until they have made a whole framework, then go over it all again, spewing glue. Unlike Wright, they do not give themselves over to the faith that a spoked wheel (much less one made of axles) need not be crafted with a Daedalean cunning.

With Cézanne in mind, Wright speaks (in Halflife) of

using stanzas in the way a painter will build up blocks of color, each disparate and often discrete, to make an overall representation that, taken in its pieces and slashes and dabs seems to have no coherence, but seen in its totality, when it's finished, turns out to be a very recognizable landscape, or whatever.

This is indeed the operation and novel success of the poems in The Southern Cross that precede the title poem, where Wright for the first time abandoned stanzas for larger or looser “blocks.” But how curious that the poet sees such poems as “The Southern Cross” and “A Journal of the Year of the Ox,” in fact each of his volumes and the volumes taken all together, as a “continuous story line by someone who can't tell a story”! For instance, in the Paris Review, he calls China Trace “a book-length poem,” “one that has a character who goes from the first poem, where he shrugs off childhood (a disputable reading), to the last, where he ends up a constellation. … Each poem is a chapter in a book.” But the poems in between the first and the last are like a series of playing cards in a game of infinitely rearrangeable good-byes. Which is, precisely, not narrative, “sotto” or otherwise, but, instead, a valediction spinning its silver wings from a stationary position, like a windmill.

Wright says that if a reader can't follow “the hidden narrative … I feel he isn't concentrating” (Paris Review). But how many will agree with him (Halflife) that “the best narrative is that which is least in evidence to the eye”? What good is a narrative that doesn't put you on its knee and say “Once upon a time”? In any case, I think that the poet may be confusing the plight of looking-at-nature-and-reminiscing-while-waiting-to-vanish-into-oneself (“Inside the self is another self like a black hole”—“A Journal of the Year of the Ox”) with a plot, or a congeries of preoccupations, appearing in staggered order, with a story.

But this characterization of his recent work is itself too absolute. Not only are many of the poems in The Southern Cross among his best (for instance, “Homage to Paul Cézanne,” “Portrait of the Artist with Li Po,” “Hawaii Dantesca,” and “Bar Giamaica, 1959–60”)—fluttery, breathtaking, flame-blue spurts of imagination; several of the later, longer poems are sufficiently unified or satisfactorily dispersed, especially “Lost Bodies,” “Lost Souls,” “The Other Side of the River,” “Three Poems of Departure,” “Three Poems for the New Year,” and “To Giacomo Leopardi in the Sky” in The Other Side of the River; “Yard Journal,” “Night Journal,” and “Night Journal II” in Zone Journals; and “A Journal of Southern Rivers” and “A Journal of Three Questions” in Xionia.

“To Giacomo Leopardi in the Sky,” for instance, is a floating illuminated manuscript of a poem, four pages of infectious metaphysical salute. The poet Leopardi (1798–1837) serves as Wright's alter ego in the elsewhere. He's a male muse, immense with otherworldly indolence, with contemplative largesse and enviable abstraction. This lord of the unknown leads Wright to see how “sweet” it would be to drown “in such sure water” as the infinite (an allusion to “E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare” in Leopardi's “L'infinito”). With the imaginative bravado of his earlier work, Wright claims to see him “On your left side through the clouds / Looking down on us, / our tongues tied.” What is “bitter,” he adds, is being “so much like you,” canceled out of life without being similarly raised up.

Having taken “three steps to the stars,” the Italian poet focuses for Wright the displaced condition of our existence: “Never to see the light is best, you say” (a paraphrase of “mai non veder la luce / Era, credo, il miglior” from Leopardi's “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale”). Yet—and some of Wright's long poems could use concentrated acid spits of such self-opposition—the poet suddenly relents, and says

You'd like it on this side, I think.
                                        Summer is everywhere, your favorite,
And dirt still crumbles and falls like small rain from the hand.
The wind blows in from the sea …

Wright then gives us a Leopardi more amorously sad than himself: “The days not long enough, and the nights not long enough / For you to suffer it all”: suffering filling a void yet resting in it erotically, tantamount to a fetish that recalls an impossible love.

What links the here and the there is not language (which is reduced in the upper reaches to “The same letter over and over / big o and little o,” in keeping with the depressive person's hyperlucidity with regard to its arbitrariness, to words essentially “empty,” even of pain), but thought: “Think of me now and then … I'll think of you.” So the poem ends, but not before the knockout image “When the moon's like a golden tick on the summer sky, / Gorged with light,” a figure of Wright's own wish to be outside the absolute yet nourished and enlarged by it. A poet so atomistic as Wright is can use pow bam bits like this (this one so powerfully evocative and felicitous in its happy discovery that “tick” is just as large as “moon,” in its fattening chiasmus of “like … golden … Gorged … light,” and in the engorged sound of “or” in “Gorged,” coming in so hoggishly at the beginning of a line). In fact Wright tries, at times, for nothing less. There is no logic of progression, no purling continuity, to disrupt.

Here Wright's meditative practice of description—and this poet is the St. Ignatius of dark puddles and “pearl-dusked” trees—benefits from the taut string of dialogue, a sweet-pea-vine verticality of address. That Leopardi hides “behind the noon light” steeps “the spider drawn up in flame,” the one hovering near Wright, at once in worldly glare and spooky-ethereal eye-beams. Moreover, in contrast to the memory and journal poems that lack so single a focus, the poem knits and purls through holes of its own making and near containment. It has both esoteric brotherhood and chill, a foothold on the earth and metaphysical mad-farer's eyes. It's exhilarating to read, strangely refining.

The poem also avoids a frequent habit in the journal poems, that of setting philosophical generalities or questions side by side with blocks of description:

—Truth is the absence of falsehood,
                                        beauty the absence of ugliness,
Jay like a stuffed toy in the pear tree,
Afternoon light-slant deep weight
                                        diluting to aftermath on the lawn,
Jay immobile and fluffed up,
Cloud like a bass note, held and slow …

(“A Journal of the Year of the Ox”)

Plunked down, the abstraction “Truth is the absence of falsehood, / beauty the absence of ugliness” does not ride any wave of mood or argument. It just jerks by like a shooting duck for skepticism. I would quarrel with both parts of the statement. It's unregenerately “binary,” defiantly un-Derrida'd. What a poet does not want from readers is niggling disagreement. In any case, you can pull such statements out of their context without tearing any delicate fibers of connection. They are one more manifestation of Wright's tendency toward disintegration, one that lacks seduction.

Another recurring weakness in the work of the eighties—since the tune has once more swerved that way—is an occasional image-for-its-own sake, though this is really a symptom of a larger problem, that of beautiful writing as an end in itself. Such images remain unilluminated by a contextual flare-light or, conversely, fail to be a flare-light for their context:

Twilight, old friend, has come back to the lower orchard.
Two grackles waddle across the grass.
Doves moan,
                    petals fall like tiny skirts
From the dogwood tree next door,
                                                            last things in the last light.

(“Vesper Journal”)

Charming as they may be, those “tiny skirts” need to be shipped back to the warehouse; they're frivolous in the neighborhood of “last things.” Or, equally, “last things in the last light” may be thought of as sentimentally appended, rote-Wright.

Again, does it signify, in “Language Journal,” that the light is “cantaloupe-colored”? Is this more than a “pretty” detail? To call such luscious light “Light of martyrs and solitaries” only makes matters worse, as does imagining it “ladled” like “a liquid” on the trees. Here, as occasionally elsewhere, Wright's artistic severity, once electrifyingly sharp, masochistic, has gone soft.

Then, too, Wright's new manner began to settle in on itself almost as soon as it was formed in “The Southern Cross.” It is really too bad that once a poet has become a style, he might do well to break it up and start over. Few ask it of painters, and indeed Wright has said (in the Paris Review), “I want people to be able to look at a poem of mine on the page, read it, and to say, as though they had seen a painting on a wall, ‘This is Charles Wright.’” In fact, lack a distinctive style and, painter or poet, you're ignored by a critical establishment governed by a sort of consumerist mentality that depends on being able to recognize brands. But whereas Cézannes are scattered all over the world, The World of the Ten Thousand Things comes into your home as a metacollection, Wright extensive and in concentration. It may be ungenerous to complain that there's too much of one good thing. After all, no one's required to read all the poems in a matter of hours or days.

In any case, to those given to hanging on Wright's every word, it begins to matter that the “slip of phrase against phrase” seems more and more to have its way smoothed by his own precedents; that there are still further references to madonnas, saints, penitents, and reliquaries; that the wind is often doing this or saying that; that “vowels” and “consonants” yet again appear as tropes; that verbs and adverbs sometimes come in pairs that sound too nifty (e.g., “whiffle and spin”); that phrases are occasionally repeated in succession, a device once mesmerizing, now stock. Precisely because Wright may be more capable than anyone else of innoculating readers with a bewitching novelty, one may become impatient with repeated formulas (say, abstraction and concreteness turned at blind angles to one another). The problem is compounded by what Wright does to the conventional, if loose and malleable, concept of the “poem,” making it all but synonymous with that additive genre, the diary. As the poems become less and less distinct from one another in topic and structure, and the style continues the same, “style,” and a single style, is in danger of replacing “poem.”

Thus the Charles Wright of Xionia is mostly familiar, though, even so, more than usually slippery. Some of the old CW's—the pilgrim of pear trees and ashes, foster child of slow rivers (if not of Italy), hunkering cabin-porch and backyard contemplative; the half-true, half-turned-away painter of nature (perhaps no better verbal painter this half-century), the word scorner (“The tongue cannot live up to the heart”: “December Journal”)—these are joined by (1) a poet stung by deconstruction into a defense of nature's gleaming realness,

The water beads necklaced across the bare branch of this oak tree
Have something to say now
                                        but not about syllables,
For water they are, and to water they shall return …

(“Language Journal”)

and (2) a Charles kicked back from the absolute, one who says “Everything's beautiful that stays in its due order, / Every existing thing can be praised when compared with nothingness” (“December Journal”). In a trial appearance, this same Wright had said in “Italian Days” in The Other Side of the River, “What gifts there are are all here, in this world.”

This wish to accommodate the universe, the thing poor Margaret Fuller was laughed at for announcing, has been implicit in Wright's recent taste for memory's dark honey. But little had prepared one for this new champion of “immanence of infinitude,” this trout that snaps at real flies in a halo of sunlight, this latter-day ambiguous Wordsworth who hails the world “just under our fingertips” and wants to touch “the undersides” of all he ever touched in the natural world (“December Journal”), or “be loose fire / Licking the edges of all things but the absolute” (“Bicoastal Journal”). Like most recent converts, he tends to be preachy: “If faith believes, and hope and love pray, then we should pray—/ For true affection in the natural world. / No wisdom can bring this grace, no charity touch it” (“Primitive Journal”).

To me, the best poem in Xionia is the short “A Journal of Three Questions.” Here the old Wright, the one blinded by the “blank, / the far side of the last equation” (“December Journal”) fuses with the emergent one, the Hopkinsian or de Chardinian adherent to “the physical world, / a liquid glory, / Instead of a struck eternity / Painted and paralyzed / at this end and the other” (i.e., in art and theology and in the other world). The result is formidably ambivalent:

Bees at the six-pointed junkweed blooms,
Ants on the move on the undersides
                                                            and down the stems
Into a vast, prehensile darkness
Around the roots of the wheat grass and the violets.
Who was it first recognized the beginning of the end?
How many miles exist between the light and the dark
When light and dark are obscured?
                                                            Who can distinguish them?
Bees and ants are mean creatures, their powers pervasive.

The tension between the “prehensile darkness” and the insects “on the move” or “at” something is mysterious, convincing, scary, as is that between “mean creatures” and “powers pervasive.” Finding the end in the beginning, primal darkness in sunny surface activity, the poem is undecided between horror and amazement at the world, and not, as Wright can sometimes seem, comfortable in the worn shoes of the half-life of an old grinding despair. The three questions share with much of his philosophical musings a certain awkwardness, but combined with their aggression that quality seems appropriate here, the questions being deliberately boggling, like an I.Q. test in a dream. None of the poet's earlier turns shows up in the poem; it's a new-sprung child of the light obscured, the dark illuminated. (Not to dwell on the minute felicities, how well the introduction of a new vowel at the end, in “pervasive,” suits a word almost throwaway in its trailing placement, a word like an injection disappearing into a vein: a nothing-is-safe-or-concluded effect.)

Whatever regrets one may have about Wright's recent work, The World of the Ten Thousand Things holds its own with the best poetry in English in the eighties. It contains, especially in its first half, poems so remarkable, so deliciously strange, that they must tempt the metaphysical to swallow language. Even the baggy-sweater poems are full of beautiful passages that no one could wish taken back. “A Journal of the Year of the Ox,” for instance, has

The ghost of Dragging Canoe
                                        settles like snowflakes on the limbs
Of the river bushes, a cold, white skin
That bleeds when it breaks.
                                        Everyone wants to touch its hem
Now that it's fallen, everyone wants to see its face …

—as sensitive a socio-historical and moral moment as the imagination can reveal. “Nobody slides like an acrobat / out of the endless atmosphere,” with its witty detection of a kinship in the sounds of “acrobat” and “atmosphere,” is a winning instance of the hunger for otherness, comic and dew-inspired. Often, as here, Wright's wit has a faraway look in its nonetheless sparkling eyes. We find it again in his description of bats that “plunged and swooped like wrong angels / Hooking their slipped souls in the twilight.” And wit subdued but brilliant in “Time like a one-eyed Jack / whose other face I can't see,” which slips an intimidating card of chance into the clear plastic holder of abstract time, bringing the latter to sudden vividness, the personification nicely left stiff, not friendly.

And so on (it is very much a case of so on, even with respect to “A Journal of the Year of the Ox”). Wright's sure and forceful use of the vernacular, which laces his elegance like gin in soda, obtrusive in just the right way, as a welcome bite; his unique “striding” (“you have to hit the right notes hard, and you have to be underway when you do it”—Halflife); the singing garrote of some of his statements, for instance “No one can separate the light from the light” (“A Journal of True Confessions”) or questions, such as “How shall we hold on, when everything bright falls away?” (“A Journal of the Year of the Ox”), and the clutch-moves of otherness in so many of his images (e.g., “Guttural words that hang like bats in the throat, / their wings closed, their eyes shut” in “A Journal of the Year of the Ox”)—these are a frequent part of his rich weave. But best of all is the spell cast by entire poems through eerie surprise after surprise, as in the shorter poems of The Southern Cross, where Wright, who may well be responsible for the choice of a Cézanne illustration on the dust jacket of The World of the Ten Thousand Things, is as meditative-and-lyrical as the painter, as sensual-and-severe. How he shifts, like a licking flame, from one thing to another:

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.

(“Mount Caribou at Night”)

Far more than Cézanne, however, Wright spreads his imagination's fingers so as to let the wind of the faraway, of what's to come, blow through. His flame burns cold just beyond the erotic warmth, the heartflame like praying hands or a gothic arch. This explains his attraction to Mark Rothko's abstract-mystical paintings. Cézanne and Rothko bracket him, like color's cheer and color's gloom. His peculiarity lies in his contradictions, as through some alchemy he superimposes the finished photograph of the here and now, with all its burning colors, on the black negative from which it sprang by a wrong reversal.

Wright's best lines pierce the skin of familiarity with rays of darkness. He is one of those from whom language magnificently glooms. He has long since earned the right to ask,

Remember me as you will, but remember me once
Slide-wheeling around the curves,
                                        letting it out on the other side of the line.

(“Gate City Breakdown”)

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Charles Wright and the Landscape of the Lyric

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