These are the journals [The World of Ten Thousand Things] of a poet who believes he is in paradise, and landscapes are his rambling theme. The volume includes three books previously published, The Southern Cross, The Other Side of the River, and Zone Journals, reals, and one published only in a limited edition, Xionia. Charles Wright at his best is like his own hermit crabs of “New Year's Eve, 1979,” spinning across the floors of their tidal pools: “Their sky is a glaze and a day. … / What matters to them is what comes up from below, and from out there / In the deep water, / and where the deep water comes from.” Here Wright probes reality and creates a cosmic view of the world.

Wright's strengths are a natural, social approach to experience, a flat-bellied masculinity, understated hardness and stamina. He is impressive with the breadth of his narration in “A Journal of the Year of the Ox” about a famous 18th-century military expedition: John Donelson's river voyage from the Long Island of the Holston River in Virginia to his destination at Nashville. The narration builds by cloud-shifts to a strange crisis: the poet lying in yet another landscape, a cruel April scene of maples and butterflies, visiting Emily Dickinson's homestead in Amherst, Mass., savoring Emily's non-appearance in her white dress with white flowers and concluding with a philosophic hymn to the Absolute. Not coming to any real climax, Wright just moves on.

“Cryopexy” is the finest work in this volume. Retinal defect, eye operation, repair and the normal course of fluids through the eye are filmed and projected with consummate skill: “Under the lid, / currents of fox-fire between the layers, / And black dots like the blood bees of Paradise. …” Here are inner landscapes and inner light, an ocean of vision containing “clear eels and anemonies.” The poem is a gorgeous set-piece.

Sometimes the poet delights in confusion that he must have planned, almost graphed. In “A Journal of the Year of the Ox,” he remembers Edgar Allan Poe's house in Virginia. Then, hearing horn music somewhere in the United States he reminisces about the scales and practice of an Italian hornist, perhaps at Verona. Various Italian rural scenes are smashed together, producing transcending vistas as an impressionistic painter creates new light by juxtaposing unrelated tones. Wright's benign mischief-making entertains.

It is strange that the art of such a learned poet should suffer so much from lack of analysis. What landscape can say to him, what can be referred to his artistic, philosophical or religious musings, comes strongly into his poetry. What cannot flow to him in this way does not sound as finished art. The poet, at times, persists in banal metaphors and ineptitude of expression. “In my fiftieth year, with a bad back and a worried mind, / Going down the Lee Highway, / the farms and villages / Rising like fog behind me,” is a gem from “A Journal of the Year of the Ox,” but there is not enough metrical or rhythmic innovation to sustain a book this long. At worst, Wright populates his poems with stock artistic figures. Literary men, especially Italians, dominate the poem, “The Southern Cross.” Pound's “Cantos” are echoed and, sure enough, Pound himself soon treads onto the boards with the rest.

Charles Wright satirizes himself best in “Lonesome Pine Special” where he acknowledges, “There is so little to say, and so much time to say it in.” Toward the end of the book he starts closing in on what has really been preoccupying him, paradise, which, for him, “is what we live in / And not a goal to yearn for.” This is too little achievement, however, and it comes too late. Process is not all. There are goals to be attained in art, although neither Wright nor anyone else can afford to be too certain about Wright's goals; but wherever he may be going, he is not getting there fast enough.