[In the following review, Axelrod offers a generally positive assessment of The Southern Cross, but concludes that “Wright is not yet a poet of quite the first rank.”]

One way to suggest the nature of Charles Wright's most recent poems [in The Southern Cross] is to indicate what they are not. They mention several names but contain no developed characters. They are devoid of the hustle and bustle of ordinary life and suggest no particularity of place. Wright's Italy and Laguna Beach remain studiously verbal; he makes no effort to bring them to life, being content to let “word” and “thing” remain apart. Except for occasional parody, the poems possess no humor. Neither do they allow a tone of excitement. Frank Bidart's poetry, studded with BLOCK LETTERS, is Wright's counterpole. Wright's subdued and inward poems resemble those of John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons and Mark Strand. Their center is missing, as if they sought to meditate and elaborate on an abstract proposition that is teasingly suppressed. Wright's skepticism about the power and uses of textuality does not prevent his linguistic creation but limits and mutes it. These are poems palpably written in an age that deeply questions poetry.

In the volume's title poem the tragic skepticism underlying Wright's enterprise becomes manifest.

The life of this world is wind.
Wind-blown we come, and wind-blown we go away.
All that we look on is windfall.
All we remember is wind.

These monosyllabic declarations and mournful repetitions have their own kind of majesty. But in less overt passages the poem is equally effective. Limp generalizations and odd particulars hang mysteriously in space, as if written on the wind.

Wright's longer poems, “Homage to Paul Cézanne” and “The Southern Cross,” are probably best. But each reader will undoubtedly have his or her favorites among the shorter efforts. I confess to a preference for the poems set in Laguna Beach—about fifty miles from me as I write in the semi-desert summer heat. In truth, however, these poems evoke their own textuality rather than the beach: “Sun like an orange mousse through the trees, / A snowfall of trumpet bells on the oleander.” More typically, the scene recedes from sight entirely, leaving language in some indeterminate zone between anguished consciousness and randomness.

Wright's poems revolve around a limited set of themes: the pain of time's passage; the ambiguous meaning provided by memory; the value, again ambiguous, of language and esthetic creation; and finally, the omnipresence of death. The poems explore a death wish and a life wish almost equally balanced and implicated each in the other. These explorations are subtle, serious and inventive. They give pleasure, but perhaps not enough. Wright is not yet a poet of quite the first rank. The very greatest poems move the reader from point A to point B, no matter how unfamiliar (or even repugnant) point B might be. At least temporarily, they make us believers. Poets as diverse as William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath and the Eliot of Four Quartets come to mind as examples of that power. Wright introduces us to his own point B, but he never quite succeeds in moving us there ourselves. We remain outside these lugubrious poems. We are interested, even touched, but not moved, not fundamentally altered. My advice to readers of this book is to expect just that: to be interested, even touched. My presumptuous advice to the poet is to keep working and hope that the lightning will strike.