Here is a book of poems [Chickamauga] about the American Civil War, right? Wrong. Then what is it about? Aging and death, mostly, but also about places like Laguna Beach (“Seventeen years in Laguna Beach— / Month after month the same weather”), Venice (“Venice is death by drowning, everyone knows”), and Charlottesville (or was it Wallace Stevens who wrote “An Ordinary Afternoon in Charlottesville”?) And are these poems? Yes, if “the prose tradition in verse” still continues, as Ezra Pound insisted it should, and as Marianne Moore continued it, by writing what she said was called poetry only because there was no other category in which to put it. At his best—and he is often at his best—Wright produces prose poems in long, broken lines of verse, with whimsical titles like “Looking Outside the Cabin Window, I Remember a Line by Li Po.”

Wright also tries to observe Pound's principle that poets should “Be influenced by as many great artists as you can,” since almost every one of his poems contains an allusion to another poet or a painter; but he is not always careful to observe Pound's corollary, to “have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it,” for there are thinly disguised and badly mangled borrowings from poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas (“The force that measles the peach tree”) and Eliot (“unhoused and peregrine”) and Keats (“City of masks and minor frightfulness”). More seriously, he ignores Pound's dictum to “Go in fear of abstractions,” being addicted to vague words like structure, deconstructs, and implications and puzzling phrases like “our desires are apophatic” and “It's in light that lights exists.” He has a habit of leading the reader on with mystical innuendoes that never quite rise to the level of vision, as in “Better to live as though we already lived the afterlife” or “last ache in the ache for God.” The title poem, “Chickamauga,” is a case in point: it tantalizes us with the line “The poem is a code with no message,” but it never specifies what code is meant.

Perhaps the best poem in the collection is “Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night,” because it puts into words an image of stargazing that is quite arresting: “I like to sit and look up / At the mythic history of Western civilization / Pinpricked and clued through the zodiac.” We are not ready, however, for the image to vanish disappointingly in the final line, “But I've spent my life knowing nothing.”

The poetry of Charles Wright can no longer be called promising, since he has ten previous books to his credit; nor can it be called finished art, since so much of his poetic oeuvre is deliberately indeterminate. “Like migratory birds,” he says, “our own lives drift away from us”; but his poetry seems always on the verge of revealing something miraculous, and therein lies its appeal: it could be called a poetry of sad wistfulness.