[In the following excerpt, Conarroe praises The Southern Cross as Wright's finest work to date.]

Charles Wright was born several years after James Wright (no, they are not the Wright brothers), and although he has not acquired the fame of his namesake, he is slowly gaining a body of devoted readers and earning praise from demanding critics. The Southern Cross, his fifth book, will gain him new admirers. It is his strongest work to date.

Wright uses an untranslated passage (what faith!) from Dante's Purgatorio as his epigraph. I looked up the English version only after finishing the book, by then having decided that the passage must concern shadows and substance. It does, but I deserve no credit for prescience: Wright is preoccupied with ghosts and their demands. He tells the same story over and over, trying to get it right and wanting to be assured that in time he too will be remembered, that someone will speak his name. Though relatively young, he is troubled by disintegration and by a void in the heart. And in lines that echo Lowell's poignant “My mind's not right,” he sings, in “Laguna Blues,” “Something's off-key in my mind. / Whatever it is, it bothers me all the time.”

Charles Wright's poetry is more rigorous and demanding than James Wright's, richer in verbal texture, more probing in its explorations of states of mind, more versatile technically. What the poets have in common is the need to “recover” the places that formed them—Martin's Ferry, Ohio, in James Wright's case, Hardin County, Tennessee, in Charles':

—I am their music,
Mothers and fathers and places we hurried
          through in the night:
I put my mouth to the dust and sing their song.

(from “Driving Through Tennessee”)

Although Wright lives and teaches in California and spends time in Italy, his heart is still in Tennessee; the imagery of crashing surf, oleanders, and “sun like an orange mousse” is much less convincing than his memories of “Carter's Valley as dark as the inside of a bone / Below the ridge.” The book's long title poem, the finest thing he has written, reveals just how strong the pull of the past can be:

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.

The jacket illustration for The Southern Cross is a painting by Pisanello, found in Verona.