[In the following review, the critic offers praise for The Other Side of the River.]

Charles Wright's stunning new book of poems [The Other Side of the River] is both a reckoning with a personal past and a meditation upon life's impermanence. Wright's poetry is always verbally electric, and his work here seems more charged and more exciting than ever.

For Wright, the currents of his past run between twin poles—the Tennessee of his childhood and the Italy of his young adulthood. It's to these places Wright returns in memory, to both reclaim and recover them, and the poems are often peopled with the characters who mattered then and, therefore, matter again now.

In a fine poem about his great-grandfather, “Arkansas Traveller,” he writes, “To speak of the dead is to make them live again; / we invent what we need.” In “Lonesome Pine Special,” a poem about lost American landscapes, he writes, “It's true, I think …, / That all beauty depends upon disappearance, / The bitten edges of things, / the gradual sliding away / Into tissue and memory, / the uncertainty / And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from, / And their frayed loveliness.”

With his painter's eye for light in landscape and his sculptor's feel for the materials of language, Wright is without question one of the handful of truly inventive and compelling poets now writing. He is a poet of great and subtle humor, as in this little song excerpted from the dazzling title poem, “The Other Side of the River”: “I want to sit by the river, / in the shade of the evergreen tree, / And look into the face of whatever, / the whatever that's waiting for me.” In another poem, “Italian Hours,” he notes, “What gifts there are are all here, in this world.” And many of those gifts are here, in this extraordinary book of poems.