[With The Southern Cross, Charles Wright creates] two new kinds of environment, civilization as manifest in gem-like labyrinths like Venice, and lush quasi-savage blossoming vegetation of the sort that flourishes in latitudes where the southern cross is prominent in the night sky. Furthermore, Wright could be said to depend absolutely on place, to work from it, in his crucial journeys, traced in so many poems, from rest to intense engagement with ethereal thresholds, tints of light, floating gestures—"an incandescent space," he says in one poem, "where nothing distinct exists, / And nothing ends, the days sliding like warm milk through the clouds." I quote these lines because they make explicit the poet's preference for the hazy, the milky, the upper-atmospheric; these are the trappings of his transcendent states of infancy.

I use the term "infancy" advisedly. Charles Wright's apotheoses are characteristically visions of a presexual, light-suffused mist, the matrix of dreams and the medium of serenity and soaring, of effortless floating, a rising-upwards that is very much more pleasant but far less emotionally pressing than the sultry risings and impassioned upwellings and poolings in the poetry of Louise Gluck. Whereas she clearly returns to the profound tensions and jealousies of childhood, Wright explores an almost fetal suspended state just prior to birth…. The desire to return to the softer outline he had at the beginning before experience marked him with choices and errors and the simple banalities of repetition emerges over and over again in Wright's new volume. As he travels backward in time toward his origins, he is also preparing for his death, expressed as a return to infant dependency….

One of the voices Wright invokes is Dante's, from those two books of the Comedy whose imagery and exempla are paler and less violent than the Inferno's. As epigram to The Southern Cross, Wright quotes Statius's homage to Vergil from the twenty-first canto of Purgatory, who ruefully admits that his love of the Master had enflamed him to treat a shade as a solid thing….

Wright reads Dante with the same selective lens he uses for Eugenio Montale and for the third great mentor of the current poems, William Blake; that is, he is intrigued by the tissues of their imagery at its softest, and by their treatment of nostalgia, but not by their anagogy. It is a very selective reading of both Dante and Blake that would ignore both allegories and discourses; and without the earnest attention of an elegist like Montale to other human beings, nostalgia becomes sentimental: In Wright, however, the anagoge is always self—one who happens to be a sensitive lover of beauty, to be sure; and a maker of elegant artifacts, without question; but occasionally an artist, possibly among false spirits (this I can't judge), with decidedly false professions and poses.

The long failed sequence "Homage to Paul Cézanne" so abounds in misjudgments in tone and in tact that the reader is apt to forget that the painter Cézanne is supposed to be central, although there is little in his paintings that the mediumistic dramatizations of these eight poems have touched. Wright posits a community of dead; unlike Dante's or Montale's dead, these are specific neither to history nor to the poet's own life, they are a vague body, with no will or direction, that can be made to function like rain, like color, like darkness, like moods, like clothing, like sounds, like premonition. Hence the dead are the collective noun for lugubrious poetic feeling. Some of the personifications are quite funny: "Spring picks the locks of the wind"; "spaces / In black shoes, their hands clasped"; "The dead are constant in / The white lips of the sea." Some of the stage props the dead must carry around are also awkwardly amusing: "We filagree and we baste. / But what do the dead care for the fringe of words, / Safe in their suits of milk?"… But there is the more general problem of framework and intention raised by the "Homage" and applicable to other poems as well; the poet fails to make his choices of subject, diction, and tone seem always necessary; at times they do not even sound deliberate. On occasion I have considered that Wright as a craftsman with words, tropes, and sentences is without a built-in censor. He inflates his poetics into mere shapeless benevolence. Nothing is judged, nothing rejected, nothing refused admittance to the poem.

What William Blake offered in 1789 as a negative representation of timidity … Charles Wright exports, two centuries later, as a positive and strong representation of life, I think because for him behavior does not count, nor is religion a living possibility. Hence he can devote himself to the composition of emphemeral structures about ephemeral tints and passing, filmy, essentially solitary manifestations…. (p. 40)

I [suggest] that Charles Wright may lack a self-censoring mechanism for his poetry; that he needs to apply standards for determining when a metaphor or colloquialism is or is not apropos; that in consequence of failing to do so, and given his interest in ghostly landscapes and a consciousness entranced, his poems are sometimes apt to be indiscriminately hospitable, undiscerning, childlike. (pp. 40-1)