Some long poems are born long; some achieve length; and some have length thrust upon them. In the beginning, there was an orderly sequence to a poet's career, from the lyric to the epic, and genres were steadied by tradition. In the nineteenth century, rigid categories and definitions loosened, and every stay or knot was next undone either by modernist poets or adventuresome readers. No one reads Whitman's Leaves of Grass as the long poem Whitman himself may have thought it, and some oddball critics have read a plot into Dickinson's discrete lyrics so they may be read as an epic. The Waste Land seems miniaturized next to, say, the Idylls of a King. Even so, it seems precision-tooled next to The Cantos, which Pound pursued as an epic—but did he ever have any idea where he was headed with that mishmash? Paterson too fizzled out. Hart Crane's The Bridge remains the purest and most successful example in our century of The Long Poem, grandly conceived, written at the pitch of epic elevation, its themes spanning centuries and continents.

It is more likely nowadays that our long poems become so after the fact. Berryman's Dream Songs began as a modest suite that over the years rose, as if by means of alcoholic yeast. Lowell's History took off in the two diaristic Notebooks, then climbed to the right altitude for the long traversal. Merrill's “Book of Ephraim,” first part of another book, quadrupled in size on demand—the forces (i.e., his subject matter) insisting over the Ouija board that he sit not for witty conversations, as before, but for a series of complicated lessons. Other notable long poems, from Ted Hughes's Crow to Robert Pinsky's An Explanation of America, are really sequences of bite-sized lyrics or moral epistles, whereas a book-length poem like John Ashbery's Flow Chart just grows like Topsy.

With Charles Wright's new book, we are presented with an odder instance. The dust jacket of Appalachia states that “almost thirty years ago, Charles Wright began a poetic project of Dantean scope—a trilogy of trilogies … now brought to completion.” The odd thing is this: the statement suggests that Wright had this idea in mind from the start, yet this is the very first mention of it. To emphasize the point, the page headed “Also by Charles Wright” for the first time forswears listing his previous individual volumes, as he had done in every earlier collection. Now he lists just his two most recent books and two compilations, Country Music (1982) and The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990). It would seem that a Long Poem has been willed retrospectively into existence. Is it a ploy to inflate a body of work, or to be seen as a writer of larger ambitions? Or—this is more likely—is it only just now the poet has seen the figure in his carpet?

The symmetry is slightly askew for a “trilogy of trilogies.” Both of the earlier compilations are distilled from four, not three, discrete volumes. Country Music corrals The Grave of the Right Hand (1970), Hard Freight (1973), Bloodlines (1975), and China Trace (1977). These books are not a single gesture slowly enacted over the arc of a decade. From his debut collection, The Grave of the Right Hand, he keeps only five of its thirty-two poems, and those five poems themselves constitute one of the book's five sections, the one called “Departures” (an aptly named starting point, but weaker than the more characteristic section called “American Landscape”), and are all written in prose. So Country Music begins with a recitative. It's a decision both perverse and practical. The impulse to disown one's apprentice work is natural enough, though Wright's prose is slightly more affected than his poetry in this book, and the “Departures” suite poses as exotic rapture, quite out of tune with the bulk of Country Music. I doubt most readers, given a poem from Wright's first book, would recognize it as his. Yes, smudged versions of later, more crisply drawn images are here (“Outside, in the night, a wind / Rises, clacking the dry fronds / Of the jacaranda tree.”), but the lines are limp, the tone an echo of his training. My imaginary reader might have guessed young Mark Strand, for example, and there is a generic similarity between the two—at least at this stage. Strand went on to make larger versions of his early maquettes, ever more intimate and portentous, hollow and eerie. Wright slipped into a different set of singing robes; his voice cracked, and instead of a piping purity, his poems later sound like the crooning silkiness of a mezzo, and his thematic range abandons the sardonic for the sublime. Strand has kept himself steadied by leaning on Stevens. Wright's more febrile imagination is a chariot pulled reluctantly toward the sun by Hopkins, Dickinson, Crane, and Montale. But all that only became apparent later on. By discarding his earliest poems from Country Music, Wright wants to keep the compass pointing ahead, and not be seen as merely spinning.

In it original edition, Hard Freight has forty poems; from them, Wright chose twenty-seven for Country Music. The poems of his second book print as positives what had in his first book been negatives. The focus is sharp, perspectives aligned, tone controlled. The elegantly expatriate symbolism, all cool surfaces and murky depths, yields to a more distinctive voice. It's a book that predicts this poet's bipolar affinities: Italy and America, the near and the remote. These are not only sites, but temperaments too. In a letter to his brother, Keats once claimed that “there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things—the worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and ethereal.” The first half of the book is set in Italy—the enchanted Italy of the noble and sentimental pilgrim, as well as the fantastic Italy of the imagination, lacquered over with translucent texts by Dante or Piero. Later books return compulsively to the Italian landscape, which for Wright is an idealized field of memory, his virtual paradiso, spiritual and ethereal. But the second half of Hard Freight, and the half he names the book for, is far superior, worldly and theatrical, and the signal of his later refinements. Beginning with “Dog Creek Mainline,” he hovers over the rural South of his childhood—also idealized, but in its primitive aspects. These poems have all the emptiness, the grandeur, the loneliness of the American landscape, the sepia of old dreams, twang of banjo, and cry of loon. Wright's next book, Bloodlines, is so clearly his breakthrough that it is no wonder he re-prints it entire in Country Music. First of all, the autobiographical strain dominates. His sense of self is fraught, his sense of home darkly ironic: “Home is what you lie in, or hang above, the house / Your father made, or keeps on making.” He's come to hold and be held by “all the small things we used once / To push the twelve rings of the night back,” and to evoke the land (mostly Tennessee) whose refrain is generation:

The earth is what follows you,
Tracing your footsteps, counting your teeth, father
And son, father and grandson,
A knife, a seed, each planted just deep enough.
You start there.

He starts there, indeed, and tracks his memories and fantasies through two extraordinary sequences of irregular sonnets, the appropriately paired “Tattoos” and “Skins.” Anecdotes and images from his past—prayer meetings, sexual encounters, dreams—are conjured, the actual petals reserved for footnotes to each, the attar in each sonnet's vial of a rare headiness. These poems are suffused with remembered light, sometimes the camera's flash, sometimes the moon's haze, which radiates into his gift: “Inflamed like asparagus in the night field, / You try for the get-away by the light of yourself.” The getaway he recounts is not an angry one, only haunted, especially by the deaths of his parents to whom he offers eloquent elegies in two long poems. The despair of loss is transformed into an enduring wonder:

And what does it come to, Pilgrim,
This walking to and fro on the earth, knowing
That nothing changes, or everything;
And only, to tell it, these sad marks,
Phrases half-parsed, ellipses and scratches across the dirt?
It comes to a point. It comes and goes.

Here is Wright's mature voice, the rhetoric clipped, the tone wary. The line, as Henry James would say, sits securely in the saddle. The phrases accumulate and solidify in order to celebrate, ruefully, evanescence. Vanishing acts, the evidence of things not seen, the lamplit figure disappearing through the door … these are the burden too of China Trace. (All but three of its poems are included in Country Music.) This book is one of Wright's finest, intense and seamless, the achievement at last of his mature style, and home to some of his most acclaimed lyrics. (I would count “Snow,” “Stone Canyon Nocturne,” “Spider Crystal Ascension,” and “Clear Night” not only stars of the book but among the great lyrics of the past half-century.) The marvelous plaiting of images, the cadence of phrases and clauses, the suppressed and enigmatic narratives, the metaphysical echoes, the self as emblem—here finally is Charles Wright. The late Seventies was a low point in civilization, but out of the pot-smoke and beads emerged this austerely beautiful breviary, this illuminated manuscript. Nothing happens in these poems; there are no people. An eye slowly opens and closes. Everything transpires inside a sensibility. I don't “understand” many of these poems—which is to say they don't resemble poems I have learned to understand. The same is true for me of poems by Blake and Dickinson, Mallarmé and Auden. (On certain days I could add Frost or Bishop: there is nothing so sly as the Plain Style in the hands of a dark master.) When stumped, we call these poets or these poems “hermetic,” sidle around them, and move on. Then, like Parthian horsemen, we turn to aim a shot of praise. But my admiration for these poems has only increased over the span of a quarter-century since I first read them, slack-jawed. They are the Buddha's smile, the dolphin's teeth, the galaxy's whirr, the coins on the eyes of the dead. And they're hunting for God, a stern principle and hot desire, both of which elude him.

And here, where the swan hums in his socket, where bloodroot
And belladonna insist on our comforting,
Where the fox in the canyon wall empties our hands, ecstatic for more,
Like a bead of clear oil the Healer revolves through the night wind,
Part eye, part tear, unwilling to recognize us.

The World of the Ten Thousand Things also gathers together four earlier collections: The Southern Cross (1981), arguably Wright's finest single volume, The Other Side of the River (1984), Zone Journals (1988), and a shorter group called Xionia, which had been previously printed in a fine press limited edition. The dust jacket for the omnibus edition claims only a chronological coherence: that the gathering allows us “to see Wright's work of the past decade as, in essence, one long poem, a meditation on self, history, and the metaphysical.” There is no linkage with Country Music, and it does make more sense to see this work of a decade as a more seamless group because, unlike his earliest books, these four books are so stylistically consistent.

The Southern Cross effects the shift from the shorter line Wright preferred in earlier work to a long, often broken line. Or, not “broken,” but trailing, a hemistich dropped both to extend and diminish what's preceded it. It's the minor key of a dying fall, and the effect is of the marvelous antiphonal echo of a Gabrieli chorale. It's also linked to the way memory trolls, dragging its nets along under the surface. There is in Wright a Stevensian strain that wants to contrast the sufficiency of the world with our restless ideas about it:

It's noon in the medlar tree, the sun
Sifting its glitter across the powdery stems.
It doesn't believe in God
And still is absolved.
It doesn't believe in God
And seems to get by, going from here to there.

But generally he is after more. His poems are shifting panels—on one is an Italian landscape, on another a Montana outback, on a third his Charlottesville backyard, and so on—drawn back and forth across an ache, an eye, a desire for transcendence. It may be that all religious poets are poets of memory—the memory of something before or beyond. Certainly this is so for Wright. It allows him both his painterly emphasis and his philosophical stage directions. He is, above all, a decadent poet—if by decadent we refer to the writer who prefers the chapter to the book, the sentence to the chapter, the phrase to the sentence. As I write this I am listening to a new recording of Stravinsky's Firebird, conducted by Valery Gergiev, who takes the music at a much slower tempo than the composer's own recording. It's gorgeous, but as the hidden inner voices emerge, the arching line goes slack. This tendency works against what we think of as the epic thrust. Still, if God is in the details, that is where Wright looks for Him, that is his quest. No poet writing today has his lush musicality. He once defined his love of “the sound and weight and rub and glint of words” as the axis on which his work turns. He writes lines of a sable luxuriance you can run your fingers through. His jump-cutting is phrasal: words coalesce into phrases, phrases are strung into clauses. His poems accumulate themselves. (I wonder if in fifty years, readers will think of Charles Wright and Amy Clampitt and Jorie Graham as nearly identical poets, each with a philosophical turn of mind, but a penchant for the illuminating detail and detached phrase, each a poet of a decided floridity.) The way phrases link is itself the dreamwork of memory:

It's linkage I'm talking about,
                                        and harmonies and structures
And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.
Something infinite behind everything appears,
                                                            and then disappears.
It's all a matter of how
                                        you narrow the surfaces.
It's all a matter of how you fit in the sky.

Wright wants to fit into the sky. He constantly worries about—no, worships—the God he doesn't believe in. There's more the pagan than the Episcopalian about him, thank God. His gods are everywhere in the Ovidian landscape. And both The Southern Cross and The Other Side of the River plunge back to his childhood Tennessee, to the Italy of his young manhood: sacred sites which flicker in the half-light of his evocations, a golden bowl of images charged with mystery and possibility, with nostalgia and new knowledge. His descriptions of the natural world—and Wright looks at landscape not nature (that is to say, at a nature already composed by the hand or eye)—are as ravishingly exact and startling as any since Father Hopkins. But it is “the secret landscape behind the landscape” that draws him on, just as poetry is, as he recently told an interviewer, “a way to use language to get beyond language.” A formidable task: to write about what isn't there in order to fall silent before it.

Is it an epic task? At times. Zone Journals is the question mark. The poems of this book, all haunted and haunting, each written with Wright's accustomed allure, pose as diary entries; each is dated. There's a slight prosy texture to some of them, but that's not the problem. I expect Wright was trying to loosen things up. But isn't there a contradiction between the journal squib and the epic? Between the casual and the sublime? This is not an easily decided question. Whitman's Specimen Days, for instance, is a text I have taught in a course on American Epic. But that is because it has an underlying structure clearly informed by all the reading aloud of Homer the young Whitman used to do on the beaches of Long Island. He is driving towards a theme—the doing and undoing of a nation, the call to battle and the refuge of nature—that overrides the format of the diary. But Wright is content to loaf and invite his soul. If he lacks the Homeric narrative line, he strikes instead what Auden called the lacrimae rerum note. The Virgilian gravitas is here, despite the hillbilly slang and sotto voce asides. A larger pattern is at work as well. If there were a myth all these poems enacted it would be that of Euridyce, the tale of death and redemption and the second loss, the moment of the fatal backward glance at the beloved: how we save what's lost in order then to lose what's been saved. Like Proust, Wright would say that the only true paradise is a lost paradise.

The next three book were published in quick succession: Chickamauga in 1995, Black Zodiac in 1997, and Appalachia one year later. One assumes that, as before, a further volume that gathers and re-titles these three will eventually be published. It would be a tighter and more balanced book than its two companions, because these three most recent collections spring from one impulse. Chickamauga appeared in the year of the poet's sixtieth birthday, and all three books are a sustained meditation on mortality. The last of them, Appalachia, continually evokes an Appalachian Book of the Dead, but in no sense are these books any sort of guide to the afterlife or anthology of spells for use by the newly dead to protect them in the next world. Rather, Wright's Book of the Dead is more of a directory. He has his guardian spirits, to be sure; these books function as a kind of commonplace book, filled with quotations from Wright's favorite authors, stationed along the way like talismanic milestones. But it is the ghosts, not saints, that preoccupy him; not the saved but the lost. They are the ghosts of friends and family, the ghost of his younger self, the ghost he is fated to become. All of them suffuse the landscapes described with an exquisite melancholy. “When I write to myself,” he once told an interviewer, “I'm writing to the landscape, and the landscape is a personification of the people on the other side.” It is, and always has been in Wright's work, a map of memories and a route to the dead. Chickamauga begins with a Keaton-esque image that sets the tone of controlled fear:

The world is a handkerchief.
Today I spread it across my knees.
Tomorrow they'll fold it into my breast pocket,
                                                            white on my dark suit.

The steady, eroding roll of the surf sounds throughout the book. Its poems are set in ironic spring or hollow autumn. Its speaker is referred to as a “pilgrim,” an acolyte of the Keatsian fullness that is death's predicate. The God, or God-principle, he sought before yields now to something more abstract and intimate.

The book says, however,
                                        time is not body's movement
But memory of body's movement.
Time is not water but the memory of water:
We measure what isn't there.
We measure the silence.
                                        We measure the emptiness.

Sounding his most Eliotic, he has only fragments to shore against the accusations of emptiness, against the onrush of time:

What have you done with your life,
                                        you've asked me, as you've asked yourself.
What has it come to,
Carrying us like a barge toward the century's end
And sheer drop-off into millennial history?
I remember an organ chord one Sunday in North Carolina.
I remember the smell of white pines,
                                                            Vitalis and lye soap.

In Black Zodiac too, every second thought is of death. The time is “shank of the afternoon, wan weight-light,” and his life is “a loose knot in a short rope.” Does the poet protest too much? Has he narrowed his focus too melodramatically, anointing his own forehead with holy oils against the end? If so, then it's as harrowing as any such set of reflections since Berryman. The taste of ashes, the bruised magnolia petal, the smog at sunrise, the purgatorial wait are the cards Wright deals, hand after hand.

It always amazes me
How landscape recalibrates the stations of the dead,
How what we see jacks up
                                        the odd quotient of what we don't see,
How God's breath reconstitutes our walking up and walking down.
First glimpse of autumn, stretched tight and snicked, a bad face lift,
Flicks in and flicks out,
                                        a virtual reality.
Time to begin the long division.

Appalachia now completes the meditation. (To emphasize its role in ringing down the curtain on a trilogy, its numerology is insistent. The book is divided into three sections.) Its pared-down spareness is announced on the opening page: “Renunciation, it's hard to learn, is now our ecstasy.” Here is the via negativa, and Wright walks the line. His melancholy points an accusing finger at his muse in the midst of the shrine to her he has made of his study:

It's all so pitiful, really, the little photographs
Around the room of places I've been,
And me in them, the half-read books, the fetishes, this
Tiny arithmetic against the dark undazzle.
Who do we think we're kidding?. …
Shrines to the woebegone, ex votos and reliquary sites
One comes in on one's knees to,
The country of what was, the country of what we pretended to be,
Cruxes and intersections of all we'd thought was fixed.
There is no guilt like the love of guilt.

The tone of these poems is more tentative in its consolations, more staccato in its advance, more assured in its capacity to live amidst uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after gaudy effects. His cry now, in fact and with reason, is, O for a Life of Thoughts rather than of Sensations! He is reluctant now to indulge in nostalgia, the ache for home: “the soul that desires to return home,” he says, “desires its own destruction.” But in looking ahead, he finds “an end without a story,” the erasure of sequence and meaning on the margins of the void. Throughout his career—one of the truly splendid careers in contemporary American poetry—he has striven to write a body language, a style with an overt and seductive physicality, a style with spin on its gravity, a feather rising in the canyon, a riff on the old chants. But this is a book—no, the book—that lets go. The body is abjured. The language is dealt like a final hand.

When your answers have satisfied the forty-two gods,
When your heart's in balance with the weight of a feather,
When your soul is released like a sibyl from its cage,
Like a wind you'll cross over,
                                        not knowing how, not knowing where,
Remembering nothing, unhappening, hand and foot.
The world's a glint on the window glass,
The landscape's a flash and fall,
                                                            sudden May like a sleet spill
On the tin roof, no angel, night dark.
Eternity puddles up.
And here's the Overseer, blue, and O he is blue …

That blue—for Wallace Stevens, the color of the imagination; for Billie Holiday, something else again. The color dominates the final pages of the book—or, of the trilogy. I suppose it is, finally, the blank sky at which we gaze and from which we expect answers. Its emptiness is our American sublime. Its unresponsive immensity is the bright slate on which we chalk our questions, the alphabet of our yearnings. Let me quote the final page of this enormous project. It starts with an overview out of MacLeish, and swiftly rises, gathering up motifs from earlier poems.

Mid-August meltdown, Assurbanipal in the west,
Scorched cloud-towers, crumbling thrones—
The ancients knew to expect a balance at the end of things,
The burning heart against the burning feather of truth.
                                                                                Sweet-mouthed,
Big ibis-eyed, in the maple's hieroglyphs, I write it down.
All my life I've looked for the slow light, this smallish light
Starting to seep, coppery blue,
                              out of the upper right-hand corner of things,
Down through the trees and off the back yard,
Rising and falling at the same time, now rising, now falling,
Inside the lapis lazuli of late afternoon.
Until the clouds stop, and hush.
Until the left hedge and the right hedge,
                                                            the insects and short dogs,
The back porch and barn swallows grain-out and disappear.
Until the bypass is blown with silence, until the grass grieves.
Until there is nothing else.

So the long poem ends with the poet on the back porch, looking over his suburban lawn, like a latter-day Thoreau. The effect should be our realization that a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. That grieving grass should alert us at once to Wright's affinity with Whitman:

I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns—O grass of graves—O perpetual transfers and promotions,
If you do not say any thing how can I say any thing?

Perhaps now his publisher will publish a tome with selections from all eleven books, trimmed and shaped like a topiary, as The Definitive Edition. Or it may be that when Charles Wright has published three more collections, they will be sheaved together and talk will start of The Tetralogy. These sorts of designations—whatever: Long Poem, Epic, Trilogy—are in the end descriptions of how we want a poem to be read rather than descriptions of how it may have been conceived of or written out. By calling his eleven books a trilogy, Wright gives a quasi-Dantean shape to his project. Its installments, then, deal first with the past—his bloodlines and traces; the second, and most gorgeous, group deals with the present, the plenitude of his gift and the world, the conjunction of flesh and spirit; and this last installment has focused on the future—which is to say, on death, on the bitter hug of mortality. It has been a journey in three legs, from the autobiographical to the mythic to the mystic. The great long poems are about the founding of a city, and Wright has taken the rubble of his past to build the invisible city of the soul. But something nags at me when I read this book's flap. In the end, I prefer to read the trilogy in a less structured, more fluid manner. I can sense the underlying pattern and discuss it abstractly, but what I read is a twentieth-century Song of Myself, a mercurial and exhilarating and profoundly affecting account of one man's moods and imaginings. It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds.