"Country Music" (poems originally published between 1970 and 1977) is … [a] substantial selection from a poet in his middle 40's. The title, though it playfully alludes to the music of the American South, where [Wright] was born and brought up, more accurately refers to the silent "music" of the landscape. (p. 14)

Mr. Wright's Tennessee boyhood provides the subject matter of many of these poems, but … he is no literalist. Rejecting plot and naturalistic detail, he would draw our attention, in his finely crafted poems, to subtler essences. (pp. 14, 31)

In contrast to many of his contemporaries who might say, with Jim Harrison, "In our poetry we want to rub our nose hard / into whatever is before it," Mr. Wright has a distinctly different purpose: "I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear / Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace." To avoid the problem of literal reference in "Tattoos" and "Skins," two poetic sequences from his third book, "Bloodlines" (1975), he simply appends a list of brief notes to the poems, a few words for each; for instance: "Recurrent dream," "The Naxian lions; Delos, Greece," etc. The result of this distancing is often disorienting and at times disturbing: One wishes Mr. Wright would step into his own poems more often.

But the impersonality of his approach is a quite conscious choice, and in "The Southern Cross" (1981) there are five poems entitled "Self-Portrait" that are the opposite of what a "confessional" poet would write in the same context…. Mr. Wright's poems make a statement about that indeterminacy of the artist's personality which has been familiar since Keats's assertion of "negative capability" but which is rare in its actual appearance in poetry. This "country music" is austere and somewhat difficult of access, but its rhythms and images are exquisite and fully reward the reader's effort. Charles Wright is among a handful of contemporary poets carrying the art to its outermost limits. (p. 31)