Paul Zweig
MAKING AND UNMAKING
I
James Wright's achievement has been solidly recognized.
Last year, his
Collected Poems
won the Pulitzer Prize. But long be–
fore that, Wright had been acknowledged by a generation of poets
as the artisan of a new language for poetry: a style of pastoral sur–
realism, built around strong images and a simple spoken rhetoric.
Wright's art lay not in complex grammar, but in a stark structure
of perceptions which became their own statement. The poems created
a vision of elusive landscapes, as
if
the poet did not see the same
world we saw:
The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon's young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and snow she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or
move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.
- "Beginning"
The poem is so completely visual that it seems unilaterary: concealed
by
the standing wheat, the poet waits for the night-shapes to come,
ghostlike and feathered, accompanied by "a slender woman," who
is
the moon. The scene is evoked with the straightforwardness of a
