The Southern Cross is surely Charles Wright's best book, the one he has been preparing for through all his earlier volumes. Like Bin Ramke and Robert Penn Warren, Wright is a Southerner, a fact which has a profound relevance to the texture of his verse. His poems throb with stylistic richness, most palpably in a lushness of image and word; one needs a delicate touch indeed to feel the subtle modulations of theme that lie just beneath this surface. (p. 188)

[The] spiritual setting of this entire volume has much in common with the Purgatorio of Dante, from which Wright has chosen a comprehensive epigraph: the concluding seven lines of Canto XXI…. Wright in this book is always aware of and searching for evidence of the spiritual within the real, always aware of the possibility of angels.

Time is the most serious and pervasive theme in The Southern Cross, and appears both in a preoccupation with death and in a preoccupation with memory and the burden of the past. The best poems here are the two long ones—"Homage to Paul Cézanne" (eight pages), which opens the volume, and "The Southern Cross" (seventeen pages), which closes it. That these are also probably the strongest poems this outstanding poet has yet written indicates that his talent is both meditative and expansive—he works best in extended forms. "Homage to Paul Cézanne" is an intimate meditation on the dead…. (p. 189)

"The Southern Cross" is less concerned with death than with memory and the burdens of a personal past, just as the title refers less to the constellation than to Wright's Tennessee heritage and his preoccupation with Italy, both of which define him, establishing the "cross" he carries through life. The poem is rich in image and incident, with interspersed passages of a more abstract nature. (p. 190)

There is a conceptual similarity between this poem and much of the work of Robert Penn Warren; here it is the quality of the remembered scene and the generalized notion of human life that remind us of Warren. A bit later the resemblance is even more striking:

     Time is the villain in most tales,
                                      and here, too,
     Lowering its stiff body into the water.
     Its landscape is the resurrection of the word,
     No end of it,
                 the petals of wreckage in everything.

The handling of imagery is different, though the ideas are nearly the same. Wright twice turns from abstract statement to metaphor in this passage, as is the general method of his generation of poets. Warren would either stay at the abstract level or extend his earlier narrative … a bit further. Charles Wright is a marvelous writer, as profoundly suggestive in content as he is entertaining in style. The Southern Cross is an important book that reaches to depths of significance and cohesion new even to an artist as serious as this one. (p. 191)