Charles Wright's stunning new book, The Southern Cross …, is full of the familiar verbal iconographies and textural chromatics that have made his earlier books so distinctive and powerful. Wright's palpably physical sense of language—of language as sensual, supple material—invites us to see him in terms one usually reserves for the visual arts. Yet Wright's poems are clearly aware of and delighted by their own painterly and sculptural qualities; their architectures are simultaneously intellectual and spiritual…. Though Wright has always spoken of the profound influence Pound and Montale … have had upon his work, The Southern Cross—even its title—shows the enormously rich resource the poetry of Hart Crane has become for him. (pp. 230-31)

In many of the poems in The Southern Cross, Wright's concerns revolve around the idea of self-portraiture—not autobiography, with its implication of self-absorption and completeness, but self-portraiture. The distinction is important to Wright, as a quality of self-objectification details all of his poems. Just as each of the emblematic and imagistic strokes (of each poem's lines) in each self-portrait serves to approximate the figure, so the sequence of self-portraits in The Southern Cross serves to give us perhaps a less literal but more vivid and multidimensional reading of the poet.

For Wright, it is always language, its textures and music, that reclaims and collates all of the images of the self, all of the moments lost to the freeze frame of the blinked eye. Self, in Wright's poems, is the necessarily constant but web-cracked lens through which the world and the body are seen in their decomposition and regeneration. Self is that zero, that perfect circle of consciousness, through which all elemental shiftings—the blown dust, the drowned flame—and all spiritual aspirations are, for better or worse, to be regarded. (p. 231)