Because Wright's poems, on the whole, are unanchored to incident, they resist description; because they are not narrative, they defy exposition. They cluster, aggregate, radiate, add layers like pearls. Often they stop in the middle, with a mixed yearning and premonition, instead of taking a resolute direction backward or forward. It may be from the Italian poet Eugenio Montale … that Wright learned this pause which looks before and after; Wright recently issued his translation, done in the sixties, of Montale's powerful 1956 volume entitled La Bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Poems).

The translation offers an occasion for a glance at both Montale and Wright; the conjunction helps to define what sort of poet Wright has become. Montale wrote La Bufera during the post-war years, and his pauses in the midst of event come as often as not in the midst of nightmare: "The Prisoner's Dream" shows a speaker imprisoned in a time of political purges, tempted, like everyone else, to "give in and sign," but instead waiting out the interminable trial, addressing from prison his fixed point of reference—a dreamed-of woman who represents beauty, justice, truth…. This poetry, though it implies a better past and an uncertain future, incorporates them in the burning-glass of the present. It renounces, as forms of articulation, narrative, the succession of events, the sequence of action and reaction. The spatial form, one of many in Montale, is for Wright the most natural…. [Arrested Motion], taking thought, though it is congenial to Wright, requires nevertheless certain sacrifices.

The first sacrifice is autobiography. The autobiographical sequence "Tattoos," which appeared in Bloodlines, solved the problem of reference by appending, at the end of twenty poems, a single note on each one: a sample note reads "Automobile wreck; hospital; Baltimore, Maryland." Instead of a first-person narrative of the crash and its surgical aftermath. Wright produces a montage of sensations…. In Bloodlines these verses are encountered with no title, no explanation; the note is to be read later, and then the poem reread, from the crash to the hospital…. It is easy to see how interminable, predictable, and boring a plain narrative might appear after this "jump-cut" (Wright's words) monitoring of sensation. The problem of affixing closure to sensation and perception … has bothered Wright a good deal. The automobile wreck finds closure in sententious question-and-answer, with echoes of Williams and Berryman…. (pp. 277-79)

His next experiment, in the second sequence in Bloodlines (a wonderful poem called "Skins"), was to abandon the three equal pieces—presentation, complication, and conclusion—of "Tattoos" for a set of seamless meditations, each fourteen lines long. Though these have of course affinities with sonnets, they are sonnets that go nowhere, or end where they began: either the second half of the poem repeats the first, or the last line reenters the universe where the first line left it. Even the poems which seem to evolve in a linear way show only a moment in a life-cycle itself endlessly repeated; they are therefore more fated than free, as in the case of the sixth and most beautiful meditation, about the metamorphosis of a mayfly…. The mind of the reader is delayed by the felicities of the slate wings on the slate water-film, by the dun detritus of chrysalis played off against the watershine, by the flesh flush on the surface, by the conjugation of drift and force, compression and incipience, and by the brief cycle of wings drying, rising, dropping. This sensual music precludes thought, almost; but the subject of metamorphosis is so old and so noble, the flesh as chrysalis so perennial a metaphor, that the conceptual words—image, self, imago, destiny—work their own subsidiary charm in the long run. In spite of the ephemeral nature of the cycle, Wright rescues by his vocabulary a form of transcendence. (pp. 280-81)

Wright's aim in translating Montale has been to be idiomatic, within his own idiom as well as within Montale's…. Montale—compressed, allusive, oblique, full of echoing sound—is relatively untranslatable; his poems swell awkwardly as they take on English under anyone's hands, and his infinitely manipulable Italian syntax begins to hobble, hampered by stiff English clauses. Wright's translations, as he says, taught him things:

I feel I did learn … how to move a line, how to move an image from one stage to the next. How to create imaginary bridges between images and stanzas and then to cross them, making them real, image to image, block to block.

These are not—though they may appear to be—idle concerns. If conclusions are not the way to get from A to B, if discursiveness itself is a false mode of consciousness, if free-association in a surrealist mode (to offer the opposite extreme) seems as irresponsible as the solemn demonstrations of the discursive, what form of presentation can recreate the iconic form of the mind's invention? It is really this question that Wright takes up in China Trace and subsequent poems. Chinese poetry, as it entered twentieth-century literature through Waley and Pound, came to stand for an alien but immensely attractive combination of sensation and ethics, both refined from crudeness by their mutual interpenetration. Suggestion and juxtaposition seemed adequate to replace statement, as Pound's petalfaces on the Métro-bough would claim. Wright's trace—vestigium—of China is in part a homage to Pound, but it also pursues, yet once more, the problem of the potential complacency of stanzas, especially of repeated stanzas. (pp. 281-83)

This problem is less superficial than it may seem. Aside from light verse, gnomes, or riddles, poems in English often have either two or three stanzas, chiefly because thought and feeling often proceed either by comparison or antithesis (resulting in two stanzas) or by statement, complication or amplification, and resolution (yielding three stanzas or divisions). Perception, unsupported by reflection, tends to seem truncated, unfinished, uncommented upon. That analytic restlessness which causes the second, and even the third, stanzas to be written is absent in the Chinese lyrics—compact, single, coherent—favored by Waley, and hovering over China Trace. But in spite of Wright's deliberate variety of form, a principle of repetition has its way in the design of the book: each of its halves is prefaced by the same citation from Calvino's Invisible Cities, envisaging the day when, knowing all the emblems, one becomes an emblem among emblems. This Yeatsian notion stands side by side with a Chinese epigraph, about the ambition "to travel in either by becoming a void," or, failing that, to make use of a landscape to calm the spirit and delight the heart. In these epigraphs Wright reveals his own disembodied ethereality in coexistence with his pure visual sense.

The poems in China Trace are frosty, clear, descriptive, seemingly dispassionate, wintry even in spring…. Throughout the volume Wright persistently imagines himself dead, dispersed, re-elemented into the natural order…. In focusing on earth, in saying that "salvation doesn't exist except through the natural world," Wright approaches Cézanne's reverence for natural forms, geometrical and substantial ones alike. China Trace is meant to have "a journal-like, everyday quality," but its aphorisms resemble pensées more than diary jottings, just as its painters and poets (Morandi, Munch, Trakl, Nerval) represent the arrested, the composed, the final, rather than the provisional, the blurred, or the impressionistic. China Trace is in fact one long poem working its desolation by accretion; it suffers in excerpts. Its mourning echoes need to be heard like the complaint of doves—endless, reiterative, familiar, a twilight sound…. (pp. 283-84)

Wright is not innocent of influence; one recognizes Whitman, Pound, and Stevens, as well as Berryman and Williams, among his predecessors. On the other hand, he is obsessed with sound rather more than they were. Sound adds to his poems that conclusiveness which logic and causality confer on the poetry of others…. Wright's poems would be endangered if they were constructed on a more casual base, but he seems to work with infrastructures which are powerfully organized…. These sub-scaffoldings may in the long run drop away, but they keep the poems from being at the mercy of whims of sound.

If China Trace can be criticized for an unrelenting elegiac fixity, nonetheless its consistency gives it incremental power. Its deliberateness, its care in motion, its slow placing of stone on stone, dictate our reading it as construction rather than as speech. It is not surprising that as a model Wright has chosen Cézanne, that most architectural of painters…. (p. 285)

Wright's eight-poem sequence "Homage to Cézanne" builds up, line by line, a sense of the omnipresent dead. Wright's unit here is the line rather than the stanza, and the resulting poem sounds rather like the antiphonal chanting of psalms…. Wright does this poetry of the declarative sentence very well, but many poets have learned this studied simplicity, even this poetry of the common noun. What is unusual in Wright is his oddity of imagery within the almost too-familiar conventions of quiet, depth, and profundity. As he layers on his elemental squares and blocks of color, the surprising shadow or interrupting boulder emerge as they might in a Cézanne…. To Wright, death is as often ascent as burial; we become stars, like Romeo, after death, as often as roses. The modern unsheeted mirror reveals the Tennysonian twist of the constellations round the pole-star, in this Shakespearean image of the posthumous—or so we might say if we look at Wright for his inheritances as well as for his originality. (pp. 285-86)

The hunger for the purity of the dead grows, in these poems, almost to a lust…. The eternal and elemental world is largely unrelieved, in China Trace and after, by the local, the social, the temporary the accidental, the contingent. Some very good poetry has incorporated riotous, and occasionally ungovernable, irruptions of particularity; the "purer" voice of finely ascetic lyric has a geniune transmitter in Wright. His synoptic and panoramic vision, radiating out from a compositional center to a filled canvas, opposes itself to the anthropocentric, and consequently autobiographical or narrative, impetus of lyrics with a linear base. If there is nowehre to go but up from making the unsupported line your unit, the dead your measure of verity, and the blank canvas meticulously layered with single cubes of color your creative metaphor, Wright's poetry is bound to change. As it stands, it is engaged in a refutation of the seductions of logic, of religion, and of social roles. By its visionary language it assumes the priority of insight, solitude, and abstraction, while remaining beset by a mysterious loss of something that can be absorbed and reconstituted only in death.

The spiritual yearning in Wright is nowhere rewarded, as it sometimes is in Montale, by a certain faith in an absolute—damaged no doubt, elusive surely, disagreeable often, but always unquestioned and recoverable. The difference in part may be historical. Montale, who fought in World War I and saw the shambles of post-war Italy give rise to Mussolini, faced pressing social evils that demanded a choice of sides; he refused to join the Fascist party and lost his job in consequence. Virtue made visible by its denunciation of the evils of of Pandemonium can appear emblematic, allegorical, winged, embattled. Without a historical convulsion, tones of poetry subside into perplexity, sadness, elegy. Wright's debt to Montale, attested to by original poems as well as by these early translations, is more than stylistic: the disciple exhibits that desire and hopelessness we associate with Montale at his most characteristic. (p. 287)

Wright's verse is the poetry of the transcendent "I" in revolt against the too easily articulate "I" of social engagement and social roles. Whether one "I" can address his word to other, hidden "I's" across the abyss of daily life without using the personal, transient, and social language of that life is the question Wright poses…. I would hope to see in Wright's future poetry a more vivid sense of the social and familial landscape in which the soul struggles. (p. 288)