BOOKS
The cliff's dance and wind's shift,
Alone with the owl and the night crawler
Where all is a true turning, and all is growth .
"Skins 19"
629
In each of his books, Wright has moved closer and closer
to
this radical level:
in his latest book, he situates himself, metaphorically, in the flux itself. It is
the numen of the blood that Wright explores in
Bloodlines.
In "Virgo De–
scending," the first poem in the collection, Wright draws us directly into a
transformative dissolution and leads us
to
an archetypal image of the blood,
the high priestess of the irrational, chthonic forces-the Great Mother:
Through the viridian (and black of the burnt match)
Through ox-blood and ochre, the ham-colored clay ,
Through plate after plate, down
Where the worm and the mole will not go,
Through ore-seam and fire-seam ,
My grandmother, senile and 89, crimpbacked, stands
Like a door ajar on her soft bed.
" Virgo Descending"
Significantly, in "Virgo Descending" there is no directive agent, no
subject which initiates the action. Instead, there is simply process itself and
various stages in this process; the grandmother image does not signify an
end stage of the process but rather its final opening-out. The grand-Great–
mother is crimpbacked and senile. There is something monstrous about her
and her senility implies the irrationality of her nature . At the same time, she
embodies an awful receptivity to those elements which are outside reason;
she is openness, the "door ajar," and even "the worm and the mole will not
go" there. Yet this is precisely where Wright takes us, into a place where
there are no stable subjects, only momentary foci or centers of action, where
the "I" itself is a "something else" that is, subjectively, nothing because it
is perpetually subject to change:
Now I am something else, smooth,
Unrooted, with no veins and no hair, washed
In the waters of nothingness
Anticoronal, released .
"Tatroos 5"
