Midcareer can be a precarious time for the accomplished poet. Manifest strengths need to be consolidated without slipping into habit or manner. The dangers of obligation to one's audience and past achievement line up against the pressures of having to find fresh things to say and new ways of saying them. Charles Wright, Robert Pinsky and Jon Anderson all have considerable bodies of work behind them; none is any longer young. Of the three, Wright and Pinsky are by far the more interesting, and face the midcareer perils with triumphant results. Wright's material is mostly rural and elegiac, Pinsky's urban and contemporary, but each puts memory to the uses of transfiguration and each does it the hard way—through art.

Wright's seventh book, The Other Side of the River, has the lean bluegrass modernist music and the faintly surreal imagery that have marked his work from the beginning. It has something new as well: hard, direct statement and fearlessly drawn conclusions. Wright's earlier books (Hard Freight, Bloodlines, The Southern Cross) revealed his abiding loyalty to the South of his childhood during the Depression and World War II, and this past supplies his new work, too, with textures and idioms. He is no regionalist in the conventional sense: rather, it's his absolute refusal to trust any version of reality except that given by the senses that gives his words their unmistakable country flavor. When he says, in “Lost Souls,”

Over the green hinge of the Cumberland Plateau
The eyelash dusk of July was coming down
effortlessly, smooth as an oiled joint …

I am reminded of Huck Finn's description of a summer storm over the Mississippi, when the thunder is like “rolling empty barrels down stairs, where it's long stairs, and they bounce a good deal.”

Discontinuity, the theme of The Southern Cross, troubles him still: How is it that you can get back some, but not all, of the past? In “Two Stories” he laments:

It's discontinuity
                    and all its spangled coming between
That sends us apart and keeps us there in a dread.
It's what's in the rear-view mirror, smaller and out of sight.

He is anxious about age, fame and the possible fading of talent: “What do you do when the words don't come to you anymore … ?”; “How strange it is to awake / Into middle age”; “The ache for fame is a thick dust and weariness in the heart.” At the same time, he appears to have become restless with elegy, even a little bored by it. Putting the habit of mourning aside, he writes:

What is it inside the imagination that keeps surprising us
At odd moments
                    when something is given back
We didn't know we had had
In solitude, spontaneously, and with great joy?

(“Lonesome Pine Special”)

In other poems, Wright's familiar themes—Italy and California, Chinese poetry, other poets, pictures—are enriched by these intimations of redemption and maturity. In one poem he sees his kinship with the poet Leopardi as an influence assimilated, outgrown and placed at an affectionate distance. He also confronts the sense of being unmoored which comes over him when he gets too far away from the past, as in “California Dreaming”:

Some nights, when the rock-and-roll band next door has quit playing,
And the last helicopter has thwonked back to the Marine base,
And the dark lets all its weight down to within a half inch of the ground,
I sit outside in the gold lamé of the moon as the town sleeps and the country sleeps
Like flung confetti around me,
And wonder just what in the hell I'm doing out here
So many thousands of miles away from what I know best.

This question is by no means easy for him to answer. It is true that when he strays too far from his spiritual center he can lose the inevitable rightness of his best work. The new poems, however, tell us that he is capable of looking the problem in the eye, and that he distrusts still points even though his work is a ceaseless quest for them. Each encounter with memory frees more of the present:

To speak of the dead is to make them live again: we invent what we need.
Knot by knot I untie myself from the past
And let it rise away from me like a balloon.
What a small thing it becomes.
What a bright tweak at the vanishing point, blue on blue.

(“Arkansas Traveller”)

Wright's desolations, illuminations, losses and recoveries take place in landscapes with winter hibiscus, jack pines, pepper trees, red-tailed hawks, rivers with pebbled beds and iridescent orchards, where night skies are visible and “Where chainsaws / Whittle away at the darkness, and diesel rigs / Carry our deaths all night through the endless rain.” He continues to write exquisite poetry that is full without fatness, bitter without enmity and American to its bones.