[In the following excerpt, Bedient commends Wright's skeptical meditations in Chickamauga, but notes that Wright's treatment of the subject of language is not wholly successful.]

Complexity, meaning integration achieved against multiple currents, against odds, is indispensable to major poetic accomplishment. The exquisitely simple lyric—say, “O wild West Wind”—is rare; and given its extreme brevity, “O wild West Wind,” at least, is not so very simple. It is undeniably a great lyric. But major? Major implies the inner bonding of much complexity, even if the result is—as increasingly it has been required to be—half open. …

Charles Wright's Chickamauga returns us to the anguish (which is not to say the achievement) of “transubstantiated moments.” Chickamauga, “site of a Civil War battle on the border of the poet's native Tennessee,” as the dust jacket instructs, is a misleading title; no poet brushes history aside more readily than Wright in order to focus on the turning pages of the scripture of light or to listen to the phantom wealth of “the silence.” History? It “handles our past like spoiled fruit.” It is judged mercilessly, with little of Milosz's profound regret.

The beautiful, doomed name “Chickamauga” may be relevant only because it is, for most Americans, now lost in alienness. The tension, the question, in Wright's work has always been: is this moment, this place (or a past moment, a past place), alien, or not alien enough? His poetry is praise of the exotic, judgment against the familiar, which is often dead or dying by virtue of its familiarity. And nothing is more exotic than the unnamable, the invisible, than what Wright calls, in “Cicada” (echoing The Waste Land), “the silence,” “the emptiness.”

In Chickamauga as in other books, Wright has two styles: an elegiac linear spin and half-line drop, unspooling, leaving him with the blank wooden thread-pony at the end of everything—the decade, the moment, the poem—as a token of “the emptiness”; and a more ritualistic style, measured in patterns of two, this foot and that foot, answering to the body's preverbal experience of balance. He falls back on this second style when linearity disappoints him, as by its nature it must.

This poet has long proven himself a wizard of language and its music, and of natural description inflected by metaphysical hunger, a hunger alternately unsatisfied and fed imaginary, unspoilable fruit. It is his elegiacism that has given him what range his work affords. Everything except emptiness happens, and all that happens passes; few poets object to this fundamental law of existence in so radical, so uncompromising, so continual a way; few are so … unamused, unconsolable. In his experiences in Tennessee, in Italy, in Laguna, California, and in Charlottesville, Virginia, Wright finds the “what happens” that, together with his ravishing descriptions of natural objects and events, gives his poetry its ballast.

In “Sprung Narratives,” for instance, he tells of running away, as a boy, with his older brother, the “Second World War just over,” and of returning to where “adolescence loomed,” eventually learning “to dance with it, cumbersome, loath, in our arms.” Impossible, now, to reach back to it, to what he once could not cut himself out of! The irony and pain of time send him, quick, to the other style, which seesaws across the fulcrum of time as if trying to deny its iron linearity:

Returned to the dwarf orchard,
                                                  Pilgrim,
Sit still and lengthen your lines,
Shorten your poems and listen to what the darkness says
With its mouthful of cold air.
Midnight, cloud-scatter and cloud-vanish,
                                                  sky black-chill and black-clear,
South wind through the March-bare trees,
House shadows and hedge shadows.
It's your life. Take it.
                    Next month, next year, who knows where you will be.

Objects divided between two qualities; this weighted here, that weighted there. Such balances approach an ultimate stilling, an equilibrium. How do you “take” your life if it is scatter, chill, and shadow? In this instance, not by Carpe noctem but by shrinking from what the darkness says. Wright's traffic with the absolute is not only one-way.

Wright slices through the pear of time to the inedible seeds. His balancing of phrase and phrase may almost assure him of ontological “measure, number and weight / As the Renaissance had it.” He would like to believe (“Lovely to think so”) that “the landscape and journey” are “one.” But frequently he falls back on language instead: language as landscape, as journey. Language also as, paradoxically, “what the darkness says.” “Without a syntax,” Wright avers, “there is no immortality.” No “the,” no particularity to enjoy continuing forever. But language and “the silence”? The two do not, it seems, equate.

Chickamauga runs the gamut of the possibilities of solution. Maybe there exist somewhere, or could, “syllables scrubbed in light,” even if the earth itself is “dark syllables in our mouths.” Or maybe, at best, words only “rise like mist from my body, / Prayer-smoke, a snowy comfort,” as Wright puts it in “Waiting for Tu Fu.” At times the poet seems to forgo negative capability, to seize on a solution as if it were an oxygen mask in a plane whose cargo door has blown off, spilling the earthly goods. But his entertainment of various possibilities, which has long continued, continues. For him, to live is to keep rising to the question.