When the Coptic monks of Nag Hammadi concealed their sacred papyri in clay jars and hid them in caves for safekeeping, they did so in fear of persecution. They were, after all, classified as heretics by the church. The monks surely had no idea that it would take some eighteen centuries for their trove of Gnostic texts to see once again the light of day. And they scarcely could have imagined that the Nag Hammadi tractates, with their weirdly eclectic mixture of Christian, Judaic, Manichean, and Neoplatonic traditions, would have found a particularly avid readership among American poets of the 1990s. Charles Wright and Brenda Hillman are a case in point: both have acknowledged James M. Robinson's edition of The Nag Hammadi Library in English as an important inspiration for their recent work, and although it would be wrong to label these writers as neo-Gnostics (poets tend to use their influences to create metaphors, and for the most part eschew attempts to make of their poems a “philosophy”), the debt they and many of their peers owe to the Gnostic tradition is considerable. Why Gnosticism? To some degree because its message is self-affirming, though it is a self-affirmation of a distinctly bleak and unromantic sort. Like good post-structuralists—and many of our best poets—the Gnostics were skeptical of nearly everything. The Gnostics, of course, hated the body, and with a vehemence that would make the average bulimic seem an amateur; they disdained the world as well, holding that it had been created by a set of delusional gods known as the archons; the trick of enlightenment lay in rejecting the deluded gods who had created the material universe and in embracing the true God, who was immaterial and dwelled within the selves of those who possessed the secret knowledge of gnosis. This world, in other words, was the product of an elaborate cosmological conspiracy, making Gnostic creation stories such as The Hypostasis of the Archons read like the plot of an “X-Files” episode. The seeker of gnosis, faced with a world that is “too much with us,” sounds very much like the beleaguered selves who populate the contemporary poem. Wordsworth and Blake, both of whom possess a pronounced Gnostic streak, are doubtless the great predecessors of these beleaguered selves. But while Wordsworth and Blake saw the self in heroic terms, contemporary poets do not. Our poetic selves are just trying to scrape by, resulting in what too often seems a kind of bunkered solipsism, the poetic equivalent of survivalism. Gnosticism speaks to that solipsism, for good or for ill. (And it speaks to it even on a superficial aesthetic level: certain of the Nag Hammadi translations, because they are fragmentary, non-linear, cumbersomely oracular, and peppered with lacunae, look and read for all the world like language poems.) But if today's poetic self is survivalist, this can at least mean that it seeks to conserve something from its experience, even if that is merely the record of its wanderings as “a pilgrim and a stranger.” As Brenda Hillman plaintively asks in a poem in her 1993 collection, Bright Existence, “What shall we be? What shall we do now / divorced from our lives and from this century?” (69).

To find answers to these questions is no small task, but it is something which Charles Wright has been seeking for some thirty years. His project has always been one of spiritual quest, puzzled and often rivening self-reckonings, and querulous Proustian investigations into the meaning of time. The Big Questions abound in his work; they are repeatedly reshaped, reconfigured, and mulled over, and at times, in a very provisional fashion, they are answered. Wright doesn't much trust conclusions, even those of his own making, though he does trust—perhaps to a fault—his ability to formulate his questions elegantly, and this is why his past work has sometimes seemed too lapidary, and even arch. Wright is a breath-taking phrasemaker, and possesses an infallible ear; he has skills for which most other poets would sell their souls. But he has sometimes let his considerable talents and ambitions devolve into sophistry and the easy tour de force. Such shortcomings have been especially frustrating in Wright's case, perhaps because we sense that a poet who professes to be at work on an ongoing spiritual autobiography should not be so detached, so coolly painterly in his approach, nor so prone to glib self-imitation; Wright's progress seemed to stall a bit in the 1980s, succumbing to tics and mannerisms. But then, with his 1995 collection Chickamauga, the work changed. Wright seemed to have entered a new and far more compelling phase in his career; this phase continues with his new volume, Black Zodiac, in which Wright continues to work at the height of his powers.

Wright's new poems find him in an autumnal mood. He is in his sixties now, and is increasingly concerned with aging and mortality; perhaps this explains in some degree the new urgency of his poems. The dynamics of time and memory have been important subjects for Wright ever since his 1975 sequence Bloodlines, yet these earlier poems seem dry and technique-driven in comparison to the new ones. There is a small category of poets—Cavafy and Wright's fellow Southerner Robert Penn Warren being notable examples—who seem to practice thematically for the perspectives of old age long before they actually begin to collect social security, and Wright, with his characteristic loftiness and finicky wisdom-seeking, seems now to be among this group. He's been grooming himself for the role of elder poet for years, and he throws himself into the performance with considerable gusto, a new and more varied tonal range, and with all of his abundant stylistic flair intact. The following section from the book's opening sequence, “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” is nominally about the aches and pains of late middle age, but soon it becomes something more:

Something will get you, the doctor said,
                                                            don't worry about that.
Melancholia's got me,
Pains in the abdomen, pains down the left leg and crotch.
Slurry of coal dust behind the eyes,
Massive weight of the musculature, dark blood, dark blood.
I'm sick and tired of my own complaints.
The quick flash like a compass foot through the groin—
Melancholia, black dog,
                                        everyone's had enough.

(8)

Spiritual sciatica, in other words. And, as with so many of Wright's recent poems, the passage is wrenching and self-deprecatingly funny by turns, as well as quirkily majestic in its prosody. The bluster of the spondees in the final stanza's opening lines is replaced in its closing by the falling rhythms of the ending clause, as if Wright were sonically enacting the sharp stab of pain and the dull ache of its aftermath. No one but Wright has a style like this, and it is so individual that even Wright himself can gently lampoon it with an effort entitled “Poem Almost Wholly in My Own Manner.”

It's a bit unfair to quote the above passage out of context, but not especially so. Both Wright's short lyrics and his lengthier sequences tend to begin in medias res, and to avoid emphatic closures; they are neither rhetorically nor narratively linear, but instead seem to unscroll in the manner of Chinese landscape paintings, blending into one another and unobtrusively accumulating their thematic resonance along the way. Wright has abandoned the habit of entitling such sequences as “journals” in the way that he often did in his work of the eighties, but it is best to think of Black Zodiac as pages from an ongoing poetic diary, and the book possesses the virtues we look for in writers' notebooks: the poems seem improvisational but never slapdash; and they possess a tone of intimacy and immediacy that saves them, despite their gravity, from the grandiosity that sometimes has been Wright's downfall. The collection is in some ways a kind of commonplace book as well; Wright likes to pay homage to his tutelary spirits through imitation and sometimes through outright “sampling,” and they are a very diverse lot, ranging from Morandi to Hopkins, and from the Tang poets to Robert Johnson. Into this mix are also thrown some rhapsodic spiritual musings—Wright is a mystic, but never an ascetic one—and a wealth of autobiographical fragments. It makes for a heady concoction, and sometimes the only devices which ground Wright's poetry are calendrical. As befitting a journal, the poems almost always allude to the seasons or even to the specific dates of their composition. These gestures are rarely mechanical, however; in a Wright poem, even something such as the quality of light on a winter's day can be rendered with a painterly acuity and a subtle psychological intricacy. As he writes in the opening of “Deep Measure”:

Shank of the afternoon, wan weight light,
Undercard of a short month,
                                        February Sunday …
Wordlessness of the wrong world.
In the day's dark niche the patron saint of What-Goes-Down
Shuffles her golden deck and deals,
                                                            one for you and one for me. …

Wright here seems to be describing a kind of spiritual version of Seasonal Light Deprivation Syndrome. The meditation and the metaphors emerge playfully, via a kind of word jazz. But soon the stakes get higher, and within a few more lines we have a majestic ending, almost biblical in its cadences, and in its stark appraisals of time and mortality:

Deep measure,
                                        deep measure that runnels beneath the bone,
That sways our attitude and sets our lives to music;
Deep measure, down under and death-drawn;
Pilgrim, homeboy of false time,
Listen and set your foot down,
                                                            listen and step lightly.

(33)

Typically, the poems of Black Zodiac begin off-handedly but end in metaphysical yearning and even in terror. Wright may aspire to wisdom, but the tradition of mysticism to which he aligns himself can never view wisdom as consoling. To understand “deep measure,” Wright suggests, we must also understand that a kind of ongoing personal apocalypse must accompany all true knowledge, immanence is combustible. As the Christ of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas puts it, “I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding it until it blazes.” Wright seems, in his new work, to be guarding the same fire. And, just as the Gnostics professed that their path was not for everyone, Wright is not a poet for every reader. The inwardness and ardor of his work makes the writing of most contemporary poets seem facile and reportorial. Yet this also means that, despite its gorgeousness, Wright's poetry is not exactly reader-friendly. But this is, of course, our fault, not his. The jacket of Black Zodiac quotes a review which labels Wright as “the premier poet of America.” I don't know if it's wise to carry one's praise for Wright that far, but at the moment there is no one who is better.