Country Music, Wright's Selected Poems,…, offers the poems that the poet would suggest convey his best thoughts over twenty years. It contains 153 pages of work, and a good idea of his career so far is furnished by it. There is a blank verse sonnet sequence of 20 poems in it, entitled "Skins," and they trace from first to last something of Wright's flat, hard declaration, his closed, and bitter ruminations, his unhappiness with his lot, and perhaps with ours, as his human relatives, if not his personal relations…. Along the route of this sequence, Wright looks at the world as he knows it, this natural world, and puzzles about the promises religion once made to him, for it was that Tennessee, middle-class upbringing, church and dogmatic, its indoctrination of him to what he now sees is illusion and vanity of belief and superstitious hope, that pains him most…. In fact, bitterly, Wright, in many of his poems, ends with the celebration of the process of nature's ceaseless cycling of the particles everything is made of, and everything is, of course, insentient, unfeeling, and unknowing, as we must be as we dissolve into it. I say bitterly, because often enough this commonplace is put forward by Wright with an energy that shows that he is quarreling with the voices of his past, with those beliefs that made up his childhood and youth, and which his whole life is no more than a unremitting struggle to overcome. (pp. 5-6)

Not that Wright ever shows us much of any world but that of plants and small animals and insects; the greater human world of many histories, of arts and sciences, of conquests and defeats, of passions and infamies, indeed of great mystical traditions and disciplines, far more challenging than his childhood, Christianity, all that is absent from his lyrical imagination, which is fixed on his own sad plight. In Southern Cross …, there are some faintly sardonic poems that he calls "Self-Portraits," and there is a fine, long introductory poem, again about the dead who color this world of our perceptions, called "Homage to Paul Cezanne." Often enough, Wright desires to fly outward on the lights of the world, outward forever, or dissolve in dust below. The longest poem is "Southern Cross" an autobiographical meditation, at the outset of which he declares that there is, nonetheless, "No trace of a story line." The almost complete self-absorption of this poet while frankly thus engaged in picturing his picturesque, and picturable memories of himself in Europe, Tennessee, and California, may not be to everyone's liking, but it does express itself in firm, choice, clear writing, for it is not simply vain or merely solipsistic work. Quite the contrary, it is full of a deep pathos, full of sorrows that ring plangently from the page. Why those sorrows, and wherefore? is as troubling to the poet as to the reader. To Wright's credit, he never quite accepts the doleful, nor quite rationalizes it away. On the other hand, he can never do what his greater models, Dino Campana, Eugenio Montale, or Dante, for that matter, do: he can never establish or justify his personal sorrow in terms that might be common to us all. (pp. 8-9)