[In the following essay, Miller examines the development of Wright's aesthetic and philosophical concerns upon the publication of Black Zodiac and discusses the evolving technical style by which he approaches such themes in his poetry since the mid-1970s.]

In the first poem of Black Zodiac (1997), Charles Wright seems to bid farewell to an idea that has sustained most of his career. He has tried, he says, to “resuscitate” journal and landscape—“Discredited form, discredited subject matter”—to no avail. This declaration, from “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” may surprise readers who have come to know Wright through his strange territories of memory and experience: the hypertrophic green backdrops of his Tennessee youth; the Italian paesaggio of his army service and Fulbright travels; the Pacific of his seventeen-year residence in Laguna Beach; and, most recently, his Charlottesville backyard, a sort of suburban cloister for his daily meditations. Wright's dismissal of the journal might also seem too harsh: though the exhausting vigil of “A Journal of the Year of the Ox” doesn't beg to be repeated, the poet has successfully preserved vestiges of the form up to the present.

Discredited or not, landscape and journal still structure his poems. “Apologia” begins with the blooming of April dogwood and ends in the summertime profusion of honeysuckle and poison ivy, and its seasons progress in installments of description and meditation. Wright's brief plaint might, then, be read as a diary entry in a dark mood: a bad day to be superseded, without comment, by better ones. Even on a dull afternoon, Wright can reanimate himself in the natural world with descriptive tenacity. Over the years he has given lasting illumination to Emerson's belief that “the whole of nature is a metaphor for the human mind.” Now, as he passes what he ruefully calls “the back brink of my sixth decade,” it is a fine moment to appraise his contribution—voiced regrets notwithstanding—to American poetry.

If Wright expresses frustration with his chosen form and subject matter, it is partly because he's always been wryly suspicious of his own eloquence. Landscape poetry lies open to the charge of sybaritism, of immersion in rich atmospherics for their own sake; even if it aspires to the philosophical, it risks the show-and-tell seesaw between thoughts and appearances. Increasingly conscious of his aesthetic, Wright in his most recent work often seeks to justify poetic description, to crystallize the ways that the visible world opens avenues to other realms. In the title poem of Black Zodiac, he writes, quoting Stevens, “Description's an element, like air or water”; and in Chickamauga (1995), he enlists Bishop's aid in the defense—proceeding, almost reflexively, with more description:

“It's just description,” she said,
                                        “they're all just description.”
Meaning her poems … Mine, too,
The walleye of morning's glare
                                        lancing the landscape,
The dogwood berries as red as cinnamon drops in the trees,
Sunday, the twenty-ninth of September, 1991.

(“Miles Davis and Elizabeth Bishop Fake the Break”)

In Wright's characteristic syntax, the look of the day and the precise date serve as subordinate clauses to the poet's thought. Ever since China Trace (1977), Wright has been fascinated by dates, the oddity of marking in a Heraclitean stream a spot to which you can never return. Almost inevitably, these impulses coalesced into the Zone Journals (1988); and though he has abandoned the explicit form of the journal, Wright continues, as in this passage in “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” to be haunted by the calendar:

My parents' 60th wedding anniversary
Were they still alive,
                                        5th of June, 1994.
It's hard to imagine, I think, your own children grown older than you ever were, I can't.
I sit in one of the knock-off Brown-Jordan deck chairs we brought from California,
Next to the bearded grandson my mother never saw.
Some afternoon, or noon, it will all be over. Not this one.

Past and present intersect in the abstract marker of a number, while the mind slides from temporal specificity to the vague futurity of death. It would be sobering enough to say “Some afternoon, it will all be over,” to align this afternoon with a yet-to-be-determined one; but to inject the revisionary afterthought “or noon” is to give chilling exactness to the day of one's death, to imagine it as an event that happens, when it happens, at a specific time. And the postscript, typical of Wright's sardonic compression, registers a subtle spectrum of feeling: cautious celebration, stubborn defiance, stoic blankness.

For recording such stabs of consciousness, Wright has perfected a syntax that deftly balances dates, description, and introspection. Despite his misgivings, it is at the crossroads of landscape and journal that Wright has found his most distinctive voice; here, he can mediate between space and time, between the impersonal and the personal. Landscape offers a “lever of transcendence,” a way of imagining himself under a similar sky in a different time; it also means what he calls, thinking of Cézanne and Rothko, utter “lonesomeness”—vast space devoid of any other perceiver. The journal-entry form, meanwhile, tethers him to the present, to changeable moods and transitory details.

For all his mystical leanings, Wright cannot help explicitly locating himself in time and place. In this way his descriptive element differs from that of Stevens, with whom he shares a tendency toward abstraction. Stevens once explained of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” that “The weather as described is the weather that was about me as I wrote this. There is a constant reference to the real, to and fro.” Wright could (much less surprisingly) say the same about his own meteorology; he anchors even his most gnomic perceptions in the personal. He has given us a memorable vocabulary and syntax for saying how a particular day looks and feels.

It's easy to pick from Wright's work favorite days, all of which seem to begin with a proposition and then to accrete detail. In a happy moment, you might say to yourself, “Today is sweet stuff on the tongue,” as Wright does in a mid- '80s poem, “California Dreaming”:

Today is sweet stuff on the tongue.
The question of how we should live our lives in this world
Will find no answer from us
                                        this morning,
Sunflick, the ocean humping its back
Beneath us, shivering out
                                        wave after wave we fall from
And cut through in a white scar of healed waters,
Our wet suits glossed slick as seals,
                                                            our boards grown sharp as cries.
We rise and fall like the sun.

Like Whitman's vicarious twenty-ninth bather in “Song of Myself,” Wright imaginatively projects himself into a flotilla of surfers. As often happens in his poetry, the declarative mode yields to the kinetic energy of phenomena. The subject of the second sentence—the “question of how we should live our lives”—sinks in a current of subordination; reflecting the transfer of force from sea to surfers, the first clause (“the ocean … shivering out / wave after wave”) engenders a second (“we fall from / And cut through”). In describing tidal motion, the constant sparkle of things rising and subsiding, Wright moves from the present participles of the ocean (“humping,” “shivering”) to the past participles of the forms that momentarily float on its surface (“glossed,” “grown”). Perhaps the most arresting of these is “healed,” not only for its theological resonance in a poem that alludes to Easter and “Sunday prayer-light,” but also for the ephemeral event it describes: the water endlessly closing up the gashes the surfboards momentarily carve. We might not expect these flickering motions to be compared with the rise and fall of the sun, but Wright's simile aptly suggests the visionary dimension of what has been no ordinary day at the beach.

Reviewers have often called Wright's poetry “visionary”; and overused though the word may be, it accurately defines the element of the extraordinary in his verse. If you gesture to an ideal realm in order to find this world wanting, you're practicing a form of irony, and if you find the ideal in the real, you're living in an idyll; but Wright hovers between these poles, a pragmatic dreamer. If he is visited by a revelatory vision, it usually has a mundane explanation. “I've had these for forty years,” he says in “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” “light-prints and shifting screed, / Feckless illuminations. / St. John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, lead me home.” He is talking about migraines, not séances. Elsewhere in Black Zodiac, in “Meditation in Summer and Sleeplessness,” he refers to a less painful illusion: “Without my glasses, the light around the window shade / Throbs like an aura, so faint / At first, then luminous with its broken promises—/ Feckless icon, dark reliquary.” In both visitations, Wright seizes on the sharp word feckless, a term of intellectual judgment amid the verbal haze of auras and light-prints.

Wright once said in an interview that he lacks a “logical, sorting-out type of mind,” and it's true his imagination eschews strict dialectics: the visionary dwells in, or alongside, the everyday. His method might be termed juxtaposition or collage, and his artistic development can be seen in the way he has put his fragments together. It's especially interesting to note how his representation of memory has changed. In the early sequence “Tattoos,” from Bloodlines (1975), memory consists of discrete episodes of hallucinatory immediacy: a fainting spell the poet suffered as a young acolyte, a childhood bout of blood poisoning, an auto accident, a grammar-school handwriting lesson. Beginning with the title poem of The Southern Cross (1981), however, Wright found a more complex form for his memory—a series of blocks separated by little horizontal lines. This patchwork allowed him to alternate between recollection and observation, between backward and forward yearnings. Rather than framing one distinct memory, these later poems create an atmosphere of disconsolate remembrance, a process rather than a result.

In light of later work, “Tattoos” might strike us now as almost naively confident in recapturing the past, but the results are frequently arresting. Each poem—a spot of time without the assurance of narrative—brings the reader, in medias res, to a bewildering sensory world. Wright renders his tattoos with the aural gusto of a poet in the first flush of his powers, as in this tug of vowels in the blood-poisoning episode:

Skyhooked above the floor, sucked
And mummied by salt towels, my left arm
Hangs in the darkness, bloodwood, black gauze,
The slow circle of poison
Coming and going through the same hole …

“Skyhooked” modulates into “sucked”; “arm” fades into “darkness”; and the “slow circle of poison” flows through one “hole”—either the original puncture wound or, more unsettlingly, the heart itself. And the immobile arm, frozen into a basketball shot, hangs syntactically between present and past participles, like the buoyant surfers in “California Dreaming.”

Without helpful endnotes, we would not know for sure that Wright was retailing a recovery from blood poisoning. The notes offer a compromise: they keep narrative out of the poem itself but verify that these were real events in Wright's life. This is juxtaposition in extremis, a strange poetry of vision balanced with prose explanations of everyday life. The car accident in “Tattoos,” with its aeronautic metaphor of “take-off” and “re-entry,” dramatizes this tension between the uncanny and the familiar:

So that was it, the rush and the take-off,
The oily glide of the cells
Bringing it up—ripsurge, refraction,
The inner spin
Trailing into the cracked lights of oblivion …
Re-entry is something else, blank, hard:
Black stretcher straps; the peck, peck
And click of a scalpel; glass shards
Eased one by one from the flesh;
Recisions; the long bite of the veins …
And what do we do with this,
Rechuted, reworked into our same lives, no one
To answer to, no one to glimpse and sing,
The cracked light flashing our names?
We stand fast, friend, we stand fast.

At the risk of generic familiarity, we might call this a soul-body poem. With its “oily glide of cells,” the body shares the stuff of the automobile, while the soul hovers as the mysterious physical vector of “inner spin,” the ghost in a literal machine. Soul temporarily takes leave of body at the ellipsis-trail of the first stanza, reunites to feel the consonantal abrasion of glass and scalpel in the second, and triumphantly emerges in the third to deliver a postscript. Where does soul go in the first? Those “cracked lights of oblivion” suggest some astral projection, the tunnel-end of proverbial near-death experiences; and yet, back on earth, they simply denote damaged headlights or the glittering remnants of a windshield. Nostalgic for the celestial cracked lights, Wright feels a strange melancholy of anticlimax about being “reworked” into his “same” life; and we, too, might feel betrayed by the sententious stoicism of the conclusion. Is this the wisdom of the resurrected—we stand fast? The last line seems purposely trite, as if to suggest that nothing worthwhile can be retrieved from such experiences other than an art in which they're recreated.

Wright's tendencies toward the abstract and the biographical merge in “Homage to Paul Cézanne,” the opening poem of The Southern Cross. Having mourned the deaths of his parents in separate poems in Bloodlines, Wright achieves in “Homage” a crystallization—stoically purged of particularity, yet unmistakably full of feeling. It surely ranks as one of the most peculiar elegies in American poetry, in that it replaces the vertical scale of underworld descent and apotheosis with a horizontal landscape of Lucretian dispersal. This is the essential territory Wright has visited ever since, saying in various ways that we remain in the landscape forever. As he starkly and rather awkwardly puts it in “Apologia Pro Vita Sua”: “Like any visible thing, / I'm always attracted downward, and soon to be killed and assimilated.”

“Homage,” Wright has explained, grew out of a nocturnal glimpse of white rectangles on his lawn, which turned out, next morning, to be loose leaves of notebook paper: “At night, in the fish-light of the moon, the dead wear our white shirts / To stay warm, and litter the fields. / We pick them up in the mornings, dewy pieces of paper and scraps of cloth.” With this premise, the bare truth behind the illusion is exposed, a truth that turns with tantalizing ambiguity on the fulcrum of litter: if it's a transitive verb, the dead are leaving wanton scraps from their midnight gathering; if intransitive, the dead revert to particles in the landscape, and the spell is broken. Poised between these possibilities, the poem suggests how momentary shivers of the uncanny can become comforting presences, the way the dead might be caught through peripheral vision, in light glimmering on a chair or a shadow moving across the floor.

The poem pays homage not directly but through a visual conceit. Its lines are brushstrokes, restrained elegiac increments that correspond to Cézanne's crisp planes of color:

The dead are a cadmium blue.
We spread them with palette knives in broad blocks and planes.
We layer them stroke by stroke
In steps and ascending mass, in verticals raised from the earth.

If lines of poetry do indeed compare with painterly lines, then Wright might implicitly be justifying the static quality of his syntax—unrelieved by variable phrasing, the dead do such-and-such and we do thus-and-so. This plain style echoes the terse subject-verb cadence in the poems of China Trace, which, for all its imagistic originality, can be dull on the ears, a sort of strained haiku. Yet in “Homage,” Wright's syntactic monotony provides a neutral background against which he arrays the protean shapes of the dead: ghosts in the house who “lie in our beds with their gloves off / And touch our bodies,” Puckish sprites who “shuttle their messengers through the oat grass,” empty spaces the tide fills in, “globules of light,” droplets of rain.

When the spell of this litany is broken in the last section, we feel it as a strangely moving loss—so lulled have we become by the constant propositions about the dead. There is no more “they,” only a solitary, disconsolate “we”:

We're out here, our feet in the soil, our heads craned up at the sky,
The stars streaming and bursting behind the trees.
At dawn, as the clouds gather, we watch
The mountain glide from the east on the valley floor,
Coming together in starts and jumps.
Behind their curtain, the bears
Amble across the heavens, serene as black coffee …

In this elegy for no one in particular, we mourn the passing of a noun. This is what Wright might call “re-entry”: no longer part of the poet's fantasy, the world of clouds, stars, and wind reverts to what it always was, its serenity marvelously reflected in the animal nonchalances of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor creeping slowly across the sky. Like Keats's knight-at-arms in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Wright has been enthralled by a vision only to be deserted on a cold hillside, and he ends “Homage” with a shivering vigil: “We sit out on the earth and stretch our limbs, / Hoarding the little mounds of sorrow laid up in our hearts.”

Wright has continually revisited the landscape of “Homage” but has largely abandoned its abstraction; some element of the personal—often in the form of memory—must give substance to his meditations. The photograph, with its beguiling visual exactness, has long fascinated him as both an ideal of recollection and a naive arresting of time—most memorably in “Bar Giamaica, 1959–60,” from The Southern Cross, in which he revised a Ugo Mulas photo called “Bar Giamaica, 1953–1954.” Wright substitutes his own friends (with whom he frequented the same Milanese bar) for Mulas's subjects and changes the date. Not satisfied with the stop-action of earlier memory poems, Wright crosses photographic stasis with cinematic movement, image with process:

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 that leaves the rest of them: Susan and Elena and Carl Glass.
And Thorp and Schimmel and Jim Gates,
                                                            and Hobart and Schneeman
One afternoon in Milan in the late spring.

The poem has the wide panorama of lines and half-lines that have become Wright's trademark. No mere stylistic quirk, the lineation here makes a seismic graph of restlessness; it suits the chaotic sightlines and captures the struggle of a photographer getting everyone into the picture, or of a poet trying to hold memory still. Starting with the language of technical mastery (“Grace is the focal point”), the poet grows less sure of his grip on the past (“This still isn't clear”) and ends up with a roll call of names yet to be filled in. It is an unlyrical task, recording those names, but the longer line accommodates the burden.

The names mean nothing to us, of course; they share the anonymity of the people in Mulas's photograph, and have perhaps become as much ghosts to Wright as they are to us. Characteristically, Wright resumes the flow of time after the freeze-frame: the party breaks up, and the photographer, a casual Prospero, drinks his coffee and leaves the stage props behind. Ugo stands in for the poet himself, who, after everyone has left, lingers in memory, sparely marking the passage of seasons. Wright registers the cold finality of departure in a drop through white space into the bereft line “Ever again.” The poem ends with a disappearance, one of his favorite kinds of conclusion; here it takes the form of a fadeout through an odd “star filter of memory.”

Wright's obsession with memory and forgetfulness participates in a larger and more sublime sense of appearances and vanishings in the world, things passing through filters into somewhere else. In The World of Ten Thousand Things, the collection of his poems from the '80s, we see this literally from one end to the other—from “Homage to Paul Cézanne” to the curt “Last Journal,” in which the poet offers a variation on the Buddhist fire-sermon of decay:

Soon enough we will forget the world.
                                        And soon enough the world will forget us.
The breath of our lives, passing from this one to that one,
Is what the wind says, its single word
                                                            being the earth's delight.

Reading chronologically through this decade of Wright's career, we can't help feeling some disappointment in this last poem, a pinched and wrung-out result of what the poet has called in Chickamauga an aesthetic of “subtraction.” “Last Journal” contains the merest prose-skeleton of an idea, too close to the bare bones of its own paraphrase; it lacks the flesh he had given with such sensual generosity in earlier work. If Wright's talent lies in the shock of juxtapositions, then this poem falls far short of his best. It represents, we might say, the inverse of “Tattoos”—not the pure presence of memories, but their absolute negation.

Wright has been perfecting his poetry of juxtaposition ever since the title poem of The Southern Cross. The blocks of that poem represent what he was later to call “zones”: here, they include the Italy of his early adulthood, the Tennessee wilderness of his youth, and a Montana cabin of the present. He establishes his characteristic structure: a shuttling between memory and observation, between the sifting of old images and sensations and the present view through a window. After Wright's raid on his mental attic for stored souvenirs, the outward vista promises a momentary gust of spring cleaning. Wright, who's often professed an aversion to linear narrative, admires the caprices of the weather not only as emblems of human consciousness but as alternatives to it: “The rain just starting to fall, and then not fall, / No trace of a story line.” The poem, it turns out, also lacks storyline; in fact, many recollections echo the flat binary syntax of the rain—the rhythm of falling and suddenly not falling:

It's 1936, in Tennessee. I'm one
And spraying the dead grass with a hose.
The curtains blow in and out.
And then it's not. And I'm not and they're not.

Wright's memories often appear in this penumbral way, like glimpses through billowing curtains. If, to borrow a phrase from Tennyson, these poetic blocks are short swallow-flights, then some never really get off the ground; but fortunately, not all are earthbound. The straitened, deadpan notation of “China Trace” and “Homage” alternates with more extended lyricism, as when Wright recalls time spent in Venice:

After 12 years it's hard to recall
That defining sound the canal made at sundown, slap
Of tide swill on the church steps,
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
Silently, mewling and quick yelps of the gulls
Wheeling from shadow into the pink and grey light over the Zattere,
Lapping and rocking of water endlessly,
At last like a low drone in the dark shell of the ear
As the night lifted like mist from the Ogni Santi
And San Sebastiano
                                        into the cold pearl of the sky …

The attempt to recapture one sound yields a radiant accretion of other layers of experience: opalescent colors, place-names, the cries of gulls. Even as he laments the difficulty of recalling the canal's “defining sound,” those echoing liquids and labials—slap, slipping, slabs, ripples, lapping—say otherwise. The ear, Blake said, is a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in, and here Wright synesthetically imagines it as a dark shell to hold the pearl of the sky, a reliquary akin to memory itself.

On the inadequacy of memory, we may think the poet protests too much, as when he writes, “I can't remember the colors I said I'd never forget / On Via Giulia at sundown, / The ochres and glazes and bright hennas of each house.” Hasn't he invoked the precise shades of the artist's palette? But no: they form only a generalized Mediterranean postcard, a loose approximation of what that street looked like on a certain day and hour. The kaleidoscopic sensations of Wright's time in Italy remain inextricably a part of the past, “an otherness inside us / We never touch,” a pearl that can't be pried from the shell. Whatever onomatopoeia the poet applies to the Venetian canal can only be a pale surrogate of the original moment: it was Wright, as Stevens would say, and not the canal we heard.

Stevens, of course, exulted in the breach between imaginative language and experience; but Wright has never felt such confidence, partly because he's striven to represent his past in a way that Stevens never did. Over the years, Wright's attempts have often come attached to a caveat about language—as pale shadow, residue, proximate marker for vanished things. In such moments the poet gives us eloquence with one hand and takes it away with a dismissive wave of the other. Scholars of the elegy call this the “inexpressibility topos,” but we, after repeated exposure, might call it merely a tiresome habit. In much of his finest work, Wright forgets to lament his limitations, as at the end of “The Southern Cross,” where he transforms the empty spaces of the irrecoverable and inaccessible into a place of exquisite yearning:

It's what we forget that defines us, and stays in the same place,
And 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.

Forgetfulness here takes on a broader significance, encompassing not only the gaps in Wright's memory but also the things he could never have known. Rather than assigning himself something (the sound of a Venetian canal) to recall, he imagines a place that existed on the day of his birth, but of which he could have no consciousness. After starting with a memory of himself at age one, Wright presses further back, to the horizon of his existence. Like Keats's embowered niche in “Ode to a Nightingale,” the imprint in the Tennessee landscape is both bed and grave; it links Wright's first year to the hour of his death, as well as to a pastoral beyond that shimmers with a light that never was on sea or land.

By now such landscapes are immediately recognizable as Wright's, not only for their language but for their appearance on the page: the airy amplitude of white space, the outrider-lines drifting eastward like clouds. From a long line of cartographic intricacy (“Somewhere in all that network of rivers and roads and silt hills”), the eye moves to a short line of yearning (“A city I'll never remember”) to an outrider of dreamlike fragility (“its walls the color of pure light”). Why is this last line set adrift? Imagine it incorporated into the preceding one, or capitalized and moved to the left margin: its fugitive unreality would be diminished.

Wright's lineation, then, marks a kind of conceptual zoning. In “To Giacomo Leopardi in the Sky,” from The Other Side of the River (1984), the eighteenth-century poet hovers as a constellated patron saint while Wright marks time below:

I know you're up there, hiding behind the noon light
And the crystal of space.
                                        Down here,
In the lurch and gasp the day makes as it waits for you
In your black suit and mother-of-pearl,
The mail comes, the garbage goes,
                                                            the paired butterflies
Dip and swoop in formation,
Bees trail their tongues
                                        and tiptoe around the circumferences
Of the melaleuca puffs,
Sucking the sweetness up, July 27th,
The hummingbird asleep on her branch,
                                                                      the spider drawn up in flame.

The indented “Down here” literalizes Leopardi's drop from the firmament, but Wright's earthly gaze nonetheless pulls us into a comforting place, containing the cheerful in-out cycle of mail and garbage, the acrobatics of butterflies, the tropical specificity of melaleuca. Often in Wright's poems of the '80s and '90s, it is impossible to quote just a few lines, so irresistible is the rhythm of his observation—the opposite of the halting sentence-units of his earlier work. “Sucking the sweetness up, July 27th” may not be astonishing in itself, but it takes part in a larger mosaic of notation. Here he takes a bemused pleasure in the sheer arbitrariness of dates, in the sense that neither the celestial Leopardi nor the buzzing bees care a fig for July 27; only Wright, caught between them, does. In his manner of juxtaposition, he places two poets—one living, one dead—on either side of a veil. But the real interest of such symbolic zoning lies in the way Wright makes the realms of life and death overlap, to reach a new sense that, as Frost put it, earth's a fine place for living.

Other poems from this volume have strong Christian overtones, in the familiar Wrightian effort to see tokens of the sacred in the ordinary. Set on Easter Sunday, a frequent seasonal touchstone for him, the title poem cheekily refers to the “purple joy” of a Chevrolet, and it compellingly connects vernal nourishment with the rite of communion in the epithet “Easter with all its little mouths open into the rain.” “Lost Bodies” is a meditation organized around the axis of a remembered hilltop crucifix in Tennessee, a beacon that impassively watches over sordid motel liaisons and the dilapidation of tourist cabins along a forgotten stretch of road. Introducing a technique he will repeat in Zone Journals, Wright interleaves all this with memories of Lake Garda. Italy, a “sacred place” in his mythology, shines through the drearily opaque landscape in glimpses of almond blossoms and cypresses. These halcyon memories might intimate a promise of salvation, but they don't end the poem; instead, we return to the cold hillside and Christ on the cross, in a vision far bleaker than the conclusion of “Homage”:

All things that come to him come under his feet
In a glorious body,
                                        they say. And why not?
It beats the alternative, the mighty working
Set to subdue the celestial flesh.
And does so, letting the grass grow stiff, and the needles brown,
Letting the dirt take over. This is as far as it goes,
Where deer browse the understory and jays
                                                                      leap through the trees,
Where chainsaws
Whittle away at the darkness, and diesel rigs
Carry our deaths all night through the endless rain.

After the biological and astronomical sublime of “Homage” and “Giacomo Leopardi,” the brief theological excursus in “Lost Bodies” jars us; we don't really need a prose commentary on the crucifix. But Wright interrupts himself with such startling abruptness that we forgive his exposition: “And does so …” And what does so? It takes a moment to realize that this is the Wordsworthian “mighty working,” a coiled energy that unspools itself in inexorable clauses to the poem's end. “Homage,” by contrast, lingered in the enchantment of the benign black-coffee bears—a starry afterimage. In the edgier, less fanciful “Lost Bodies,” Wright reduces his metaphor of divine “working” to the tireless human machinery of chainsaws and diesel rigs.

Despite the seeming jumble of perceptions in “Giacomo Leopardi” and “Lost Bodies,” both poems have strong conceptual organizations: sky versus earth, cross versus highway. The diary form Wright adopted a few years later in Zone Journals simply gave more room for his predilections: the juxtaposition of places, the fascination with dates, the dislocations of travel and nostalgia, the variations on a theme of weather. In a sense the journals respond to the elegiac note of earlier memory poems like “The Southern Cross.” If you can't return to the past, at least you can resolve to do a better job of recording the present—a task anticipated in “Bar Giamaica” by Wright's friend Ingrid, who is conscientiously “writing this all down.”

Yet to write it all down, even if that were possible, wouldn't make much of a poem; and Wright acknowledged in a 1985 interview that he would need for his journals a principle of design that went beyond just the calendar. The act of keeping a journal does, of course, imply certain alignments: to write a date on a clean sheet of paper is to connect it to earlier dates in one's life, as well as to milestones in history. In Wright's imagination, times become further associated with spatial zones—symbolic places from both personal and official history. In various pilgrimages in “A Journal of the Year of the Ox”—to a Cherokee burial ground, to the homes of Dickinson and Poe, to the town where Petrarch died—Wright's attempts to envision the past's richness jar against the present's impoverished commemorations, such as the tourist-trap frescoes advertising Petrarch's poetry and a heartbreaking sign that scrupulously marks the “3.61 Acres Returned” to the Cherokee nation. Remembering the Verona stadium where he used to have reveries about Catullus, Wright calibrates the limits of his search for lost time in a physical gesture of straining:

Catullus's seat—VALERI—was carved on top of the left-hand wing.
I used to try to imagine—delicious impossibility—
What it must have been like to be him,
                                                            his vowels and consonants
The color of bee wings in the bee-colored afternoons.
An iron-spiked and barbed-wire jut-out and overhang loomed
Just to my left.
                              I always sat as close to it as I could.

To quote “Lost Bodies,” this is as far as it goes. Wright's longing for the honeyed hives of Roman poetry runs into the fences of the present; yet those “bee-colored afternoons” seem, for a moment, to encompass both eras. Stadiums might crumble, but the weather is forever; and Wright uses the color of skies as a transcendent backdrop that squares his calendar with the grander time-line. When he refers to skies as “pre-Columbian” or “Mannerist,” he is not merely engaging in aesthetic free association but thinking about the periods they represent and what Stevens called “the look of things,” then and now. “A Journal of the Year of the Ox” begins in the gray opacity of January clouds and ends with Wright scanning the winter skies for Halley's comet, so that the sky becomes a kind of crystal ball for the year. “How far can you go if you concentrate,” he asks, “how far down?”

Whereas “Year of the Ox” pledges itself to 1985, come what may, “A Journal of English Days” is devoted to the experience of a country, and to a deliberate vision of it. The poem is patterned by daytrips; but behind this to-and-fro, Wright is always aware of the larger motions of a world suspended in unimaginable space, amidst a cosmic wind “[t]hat blows continuously under our feet / Holding up everything.” In an account of Sunday train rides, Wright's impressionistic sketch of the passing stations gives way to a larger sense of motion:

Sadness of platforms, black umbrellas
Doleful on benches, half-opened, damp,
Tedious sense
Of expectation, the clouds
Continuing on for days past our destinations …

Of course clouds move on; it is only the temporary frame of a train window, the visual equivalent of a journal date, that makes weather seem part of a bounded picture. One's travels, Wright reminds us, are a tiny subset of larger migrations.

“English Days” closes with a flashback to a Sunday in September when the poet sat in the courtyard of the Victoria & Albert Museum gazing at a bronze Buddha. In a playful circuit of imitation, Wright resembles the stranger who appears at the poem's beginning sitting in the lotus position on a “weightless, effortless” day in Kensington Gardens; he has become a buddha contemplating the Buddha. In the finale, Wright gathers all the flickers of light and currents of air into one splendid metaphor:

Weightlessness of the world's skin
                                                            undulating like a balloon
Losing its air around us, down drifting down
Through the faint hiss of eternity
Emptying somewhere else
                                        O emptying elsewhere
This afternoon, skin
That recovers me and slides me in like a hand
As I unclench and spread
                                        finger by finger inside the Buddha's eye …

It seems like a fantastic yogic exercise—to imagine the sky as a membrane that slowly sinks to re-cover you in twilight after the day's restless peregrinations. Wright's undulating balloon suggests the world of illusion that Buddhists call maya; and its deflation is both cosmic and intimate—the “faint hiss of eternity” and the breath of someone meditating. Nirvana, as Wright probably knows, comes from the Sanskrit for “a blowing-out.”

If Wright expresses a philosophy in “English Days,” he does so in this allusive, imagistic way. We catch him, as Whitman might phrase it, in “drifts.” Yet sometimes the drift comes attached to more overt summary, as in this gorgeous description of a rose garden:

One of those weightless, effortless late September days
As sycamore leaves
                                        tack down the unresisting air
Onto the fire-knots of late roses
Still pumping their petals of flame
                                                            up from the English loam,
And I suddenly recognize
The difference between the spirit and flesh
                                                            is finite, and slowly transgressable …

We may be suspicious of this “suddenly”: surely Wright had this thought in some of his earliest poems. It isn't the familiar moral that's sudden, but rather the way he comes to it—transplanted to England, the lotus-in-the-mud of Buddhist iconography becomes a demure rose-in-the-loam.

Lately Wright has reversed this stratagem: rather than looking at a rose and then thinking about mind-body dualism, he is more likely to read Descartes and then apply it to the things in his backyard. The tendency is especially strong in Xionia, the final sequence in The World of Ten Thousand Things, and in Chickamauga. Books replace the pilgrimages and milestones of the journal-poems. In the past Wright thrived on the friction between the visionary and the real, pictorial and verbal, eternal and diurnal; lately, in poems that invoke Eliot, Celan, Richard Rorty, Plutarch, St. Augustine, and John the Solitary, he has been testing literature on the pulse of life. These poems often bear such humorously prolix titles as “After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard.” Such titles shed any pretense of spontaneous response to nature; clearly literature has come first, echoing in the poet's mind like snatches of music. “Blaise Pascal Lip-syncs the Void,” from Chickamauga, provides a template for Wright's recent form:

There's change and succession in all things, Pascal contends,
But inconstancy, boredom and anxiety condition our days.
Neither will wash for him, though,
                                        since nature is corrupt.
That's why we love it.
                              That's why we take it, unwinnowed,
Willingly into our hearts.
December, 4 p.m.
                              Chardonnay-colored light-slant
Lug weight in the boned trees.
                                        Squirrel dead on the Tarmac.
Boom-boxing Big Foot pickup trucks
Hustle down Locust,
                              light pomegranate pink grapefruit then blood.
We take it into our hearts.

“Once you start thinking in sentences and ideas,” Wright said in 1985, “you're working toward prose,” and he seems to have inched perilously close. These snippets of books might be compared with his earlier insertion of remembered vignettes, but it is trickier to paste in prose fragments than to integrate one's own memories. The demon of quotation plagues “Blaise Pascal” and newspaper articles alike: what synonym for “said”? Wright settles on “contends,” but the verb seems too stridently rhetorical for the penseur. The colloquial phrase “wash for” offers a softer alternative, its folksiness bringing Pascal into the orbit of Wright's self-deprecating idiom. In the second phase of Wright's pattern, earthy particulars contrast with quoted abstraction—here, the insistent modernity of brand names, the specificity of his neighborhood, and the grotesquery of a flattened squirrel. Wright's chromatic transcription of twice-flattened roadkill nicely demonstrates his point about the human capacity to absorb the world in all its shapes, no matter how ugly.

And yet it's hard not to think that Pascal has been made to serve as a philosophical straight man, a foil to Wright's pagan, imperfect, messy “we”—the collective persona that embraces all accidents, imperfections, ambiguities. By now, Wright's bibliographic citation takes on a recognizable pattern:

God is not offered to the senses,
                                        St. Augustine tells us,
The artificer is not his work, but his art:
Nothing is good if it can be better.
But all these oak trees look fine to me …

(“December Journal”)

As Kafka has told us,
                                        sin always comes openly:
It walks on its roots and doesn't have to be torn out.
How easily it absolves itself in the senses,
However, in Indian summer …

(“Peccatology”)

In these examples the Wrightian half-line serves the new purpose of lightening the load of philosophical quotation, of clipping a line that verges on prose. These passages function as baselines to be quarreled with or confirmed by experience; in moments of disagreement, as in the drubbing of Augustine, Wright's reaction recalls Samuel Johnson's kicking of a stone to make his point about idealist philosophy: “I refute it thus.”

Quotation need not be a stone to kick, of course. In “Cicada,” from Chickamauga, the awkwardness of borrowing disappears because the poem convincingly dramatizes the act of reading and reflection. The world of the poem comprises two zones, the confinement of a study and the outdoors of a rainy day:

All morning I've walked about,
                                        opening books and closing books,
Sitting in this chair and that chair.
Steady drip on the skylight,
                                        steady hum of regret.
Who listens to anyone?
Across the room, bookcases,
                                        across the street, summer trees.

In the syntactic and visual rhythm of fretful pacing, Wright suggests an impasse, the immeasurable gap between the books he's been reading and the world beyond his window. Venturing a quotation from Augustine on resisting “the allurements of the eye,” as if to see if it will solve his dilemma, he substitutes the stimuli of the ear—the counterpoint of a cicada's drone against September rain. As he listens, Wright muses on another Augustinian passage, about the elusiveness of sound:

If time is water, appearing and disappearing
In one heliotropic cycle,
                                        this rain
That sluices as through an hourglass
Outside the window into the gutter and downspout,
Measures our nature
                                        and moves the body to music.
The book says, however,
                                        time is not body's movement
But memory of body's movement.
Time is not water but the memory of water:
We measure what isn't there.
We measure the silence.
                                        We measure the emptiness.

If you compare the length of two syllables, Augustine wrote in the Confessions, you must keep the memory of the first in your mind even as you utter the second, while both waft away into the past. As John Hollander pointed out in Vision and Resonance, Augustine's example implicates poetry as a ritualized marker of time, a ghostly index of vanishings. Wright finds a memorable image for the belatedness of human perception in the shed husk of a cicada left “in the dark tree of the self.” The poem's last section finds an eloquent correspondence between literature and life: first, Wright offers the lovely triangular analogy among time, rainwater, and bodily movement; then, corrected by Augustine, he adds his melancholy qualification and subsides into silence. Here, philosophy is not to be confirmed or denied, but poetically enacted.

Wright succeeds most signally when his descriptions both invite and elude philosophical paraphrase. If made to summarize the invigorating “Easter 1989” from Chickamauga, we might say something about the superposition of the biological on the religious; but this can't keep pace with the physical gusto of Wright's version of resurrection—a heady brew of cells, membranes, and enzymes mixed with the ceremonial trappings of habits, cowls, and cassocks. This landscape is tinted with the pathetic fallacy, but not in the expected way. It bristles with hidden assassins: the willow “[m]enacing in its green caul,” the full moon “gunning under the cloud's cassock,” and the “power that kicks on / the cells in the lilac bush,” undoing us by a sort of electrocution. Wright has often written about the breach between official landmarks, like New Year's, and the way he feels; here, Easter resurrection becomes the disorientation of waking up in his middle-aged body—reworked, as he put it in “Tattoos,” into his same life:

We are what we've always thought we were—
Peeling the membrane back,
                                        amazed, like the jonquil's yellow head
Butting the nothingness—
                                        in the wrong place, in the wrong body.

Butting the nothingness: in the exuberant aural collision of words, Wright gets inside the jonquil's assertive stem with Keatsian energy. So dazzled are we by this felicity that the next verse-paragraph, a cabalistic aphorism from Pseudo-Dionysus (“The definer of all things / cannot be spoken of”), passes as the merest blur.

Visiting luminaries like Pseudo-Dionysus sometimes seem like interlopers in Wright's landscapes, but in another poem from Chickamauga, a line from Li Po (“The river winds through the wilderness”) actually sets the Milky Way in prospective motion:

Sunlight reloads and ricochets off the window glass.
Behind the cloud scuts,
                                        inside the blue aorta of the sky,
The River of Heaven flows
With its barge of stars,
                                        waiting for darkness and a place to shine.
We who would see beyond seeing
                                        see only language, that burning field.

The scene pulses with life as alluvial star-clusters flow through an aerial heart. Who would have thought to call the sky an aorta? Behind the metaphor we see the Greek verb meaning to lift up, hear the faint syllable of air, remember the naming of earthly thoroughfares as arteries. We “see only language,” indeed. Wright can't help adding the appositive kick of “that burning field,” which turns the invisible concept of “language” back into a metaphor, the sun-dazzled meadow in which he started. And yet this last sentence breaks the spell of Wright's fine images; it adds an opaque gloss to the radiant translucence of the words. The heavenly river barge, the sun's artillery, the sky-blue aorta—all threaten to vanish under a self-conscious sermon to the converted. Such generalization is perhaps the unavoidable residue of a poetry that aspires to both descriptive particularity and philosophical presentation. Yet finally we don't need to be reminded that we're seeing only language; if we have been reading Charles Wright, we have been grateful for it all along.