Could two poets be more different than Adrienne Rich and Charles Wright? Rich conceives of her job as fierce seeing—“the thing itself and not the myth,” she wrote, famously, in “Diving into the Wreck”—but Wright attempts the opposite:

Nothing's more abstract, more unreal,
                                        than what we actually see.
The job is to make it otherwise.

(“Basic Dialogue”)

Wright couldn't be more bored by unmediated visions of the things we “actually see.” He is after not merely “the names of things,” but “their real names, / Not what we call them, but what / They call themselves when no one's listening” (“The Writing Life”). In Appalachia, the ninth book in his ambitious trilogy-of-trilogies project, Wright is more consumed than ever by his desire to pierce the veil of reality and glimpse the other side.

This mystical impulse at the core of Wright's work, and the lambent energy of his poetry, proceed, one imagines, from a lust for transformation and transcendence. He discovered early on the efficacy of combining a compressed, epigrammatic voice with an expansive form. This yoking of the anti-closure, open-field composition he prefers and the concise and pointed nature of his image-based statements gives his poems an unusual appeal: in them we are coming and going at the same time. The hand is opening, but it is closing, too. The sensuous, quirky feeling is surely part of what has made his work popular with readers and critics:

And that's what we're talking about, the difference between the voice and the word,
The voice continuing to come back in splendor,
                                        the word still not forthcoming.
We're talking about the bush on fire.
We're talking about this quince bush, its noonday brilliance of light.

(“Ostinato and Drone”)

Wright's persona is always on the lookout for the sublime, always searching for something to believe in. God is a major character in this work. “[I]f God were still around,” he writes in the first poem—implying, of course, that He's not—“he'd swallow our sighs in his nothingness”—so, perhaps, He is around. Part of Wright's dilemma stems from his possessing a Catholic aesthetic imagination but a moral consciousness that is more evangelical Protestant. The maker he might love is the Catholic God of the mystics, God the Artist, who reveals Himself through His masterpieces of landscape and memory, nature and art. The one he has internalized, however, is the punitive and withholding Old Testament Jehovah—rigid, vindictive, literal-minded, and not interested in much more than ensuring that his followers walk the straight and narrow. Wright's God is a sadist—holding the poet's feet to the “fire of his consuming self,” “kneeing our necks to the ground,” deforming a paradisal backyard garden into “God's crucible.” When Wright anguishes, “Why can't I offer my heart up / To what's in plain sight … ?” (“The Writing Life”), we know why: this God is likely to sucker-punch the poet.

Trapped in a religious mind that prohibits aesthetically expressive modes of worship, Wright is stymied. He sees shadowy evidence of God in everything: “At midnight, the moon-plated hemlocks like unstruck bells, / God wandering aimlessly elsewhere” (“The Writing Life”). Again and again, though, he denies that vision. In “Cicada Blue,” he writes, “We have tried to press God in our hearts the way we'd press a leaf in a book”—as if God were that containable, that manageable. Poised on the precipice of Hopkinsesque illumination, Wright consistently chooses retreat over surrender:

We haven't a clue as to what counts
In the secret landscape behind the landscape we look at here.
We just don't know what matters,
                                        May dull and death-distanced,
Sky half-lit and grackle-ganged—
It's all the same dark, it's all the same absence of dark.
Part of the rain has now fallen, the rest still to fall.

(“Thinking about the Poet Larry Levis One Afternoon in Late May”)

Wright's long-running quarrel with God seems to culminate in Appalachia. The consciousness of these poems appears comfortable enough with the belief that God is still possible despite the existence of evil. What Wright can't seem to figure out is how our world can be so annihilatingly beautiful if God is the cruel bully he is convinced He is.

This adversarial concept of God has turned Wright's attention on several occasions to Simone Weil, the leftist political philosopher and religious thinker who died of anorexia in 1943. Weil, a French Jew who embraced Catholicism, wrote of the mystical, ascetic tradition of her adopted Church. She makes an effective foil for Wright's seeking: “Affliction's a gift, Simone Weil thought—/ The world becomes more abundant in severest light” (“Stray Paragraphs in April, Year of the Rat”). Here he refers to Weil's essay “The Love of God and Affliction,” in which she addresses the theodicean question of why a loving God would create a world in which suffering is possible. Earlier in the poem, Wright paraphrases Weil when he writes, “If we were to walk for a hundred years, we could never take / One step toward heaven— / you have to wait to be gathered.” Therein lies the difficulty. Weil devised a personal theology of decreation, in which she imagined the journey to heaven as the total submission of body, mind, and will to God in order to achieve what she desired, mystical union—but Wright can't quite stomach that. He's on the mat, struggling with a trickster God who changes shapes second to second, morphing into everything and nothing: a God passionately present one moment, agonizingly indifferent and distant the next.

In other books Wright has shored up many fragments against the ruins of his world—the music of language, homages to other artists, the diversions of travel, the mysterious tunes of words from other languages. Here, however, there is less to divert our gaze from the emptiness at this poetry's center. Wright's voice is full, ultimately, of pain. “If a man die,” Job asks plaintively, “shall he live again?” (Job 14:14). Wright asks the same question, poem after poem, in these beautifully moving lyrics.