[In the following excerpt, St. John offers a positive assessment of The Southern Cross.]

In a yearly roundup of this sort, because of the limitations of space, it is difficult to discuss in even the most cursory way more than a handful of books. Still, there were a number of poetry books published in 1981 that deserve mention. …

Charles Wright's stunning new book, The Southern Cross, is full of the familiar verbal iconographies and textural chromatics that have made his earlier books so distinctive and powerful. Wright's palpably physical sense of language—of language as sensual, supple material—invites us to see him in terms one usually reserves for the visual arts. Yet Wright's poems are clearly aware of and delighted by their own painterly and sculptural qualities; their architectures are simultaneously intellectual and spiritual, an achievement executed, as Wright once wrote, by “setting the Imagist technique loose in the Symbolist current.” Though Wright has always spoken of the profound influence Pound and Montale (the latter of whom he has translated) have had upon his work, The Southern Cross—even by its title—shows the enormously rich resource the poetry of Hart Crane has become for him. It could just as easily be Wright quoting, from Crane's “General Aims and Theories,” these lines by Blake: “We are led to believe in a lie / When we see with not through the eye.”

In many of the poems in The Southern Cross, Wright's concerns revolve around the idea of self-portraiture—not autobiography, with its implication of self-absorption and completeness, but self-portraiture. The distinction is important to Wright, as a quality of self-objectification details all of his poems. Just as each of the emblematic and imagistic strokes (of each poem's lines) in each self-portrait serves to approximate the figure, so the sequence of self-portraits in The Southern Cross serves to give us perhaps a less literal but more vivid and multidimensional reading of the poet.

For Wright, it is always language, its textures and music, that reclaims and collates all of the images of the self, all of the moments lost to the freeze frame of the blinked eye. Self, in Wright's poems, is the necessarily constant but web-cracked lens through which the world and the body are seen in their decomposition and regeneration. Self is that zero, that perfect circle of consciousness, through which all elemental shiftings—the blown dust, the drowned flame—and all spiritual aspirations are, for better or worse, to be regarded. Perhaps some of the special force of Wright's poetry can be illustrated by this poem, “Dead Color,” one of the many astonishing pieces in The Southern Cross:

I lie for a long time on my left side and my right side
And eat nothing,
                                        but no voice comes on the wind
And no voice drops from the cloud.
Between the grey spiders and the orange spiders,
                                                            no voice comes on the wind …
Later, I sit for a long time by the waters of Har,
And no face appears on the face of the deep.
Meanwhile, the heavens assemble their dark map.
The traffic begins to thin.
Aphids munch on the sweet meat of the lemon trees.
The lawn sprinklers rise and fall …
And here's a line of brown ants cleaning a possum's skull.
And here's another, come from the opposite side.
Over my head, star-pieces dip their yellow scarves toward their black desire.
Windows, rapturous windows!