BOOKS
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tautly wrought tercets (or, in the case of three poems, quatrains), moving
from direct storytelling to reverie, to aphorism, to reflection, and back
again to story. And the stories, at times domestic, at times mythic, are sto–
ries of the body and its capacity for pain-illness, abuse, brokenness. The
stories harrow, for it seems, as in the poem "Luke 17:32," we are destined
by our very longing to be punished: the complexity of the self, the intri–
cacies of the body reduced to the elements:
How is it in this second
world, the one where we start over, that
we still
can't get the story right? Who
cannot read shall not
be saved.
Who comes down from the housetop
to gather his things for flight shall be
lost.
But where? said the twelve.
Wherever the body is, there,
said the one.
And there (but whose?) the chapter
ends, the body turned to salt again.
Short excerpts cannot suggest the elaborate and complex weave of these
poems' procedures, but what amazes is the great distance they cover with–
out transition or conjunction. They are at once elaborate and direct, and
like parables, they delight, bewilder, and revel in their craftedness. For all
the grief they catalog, these poems teach us "the leverage / of pain."
In Charles Wright's
Black Zodiac,
as in all his previous work, one finds
a flawless ear for the melodic and rhythmic possibilities of a line of poet–
ry in the American language. Wright possesses an alchemist's touch with
the image, and a luminist's eye for the light that reveals and transfigures the
given world. The given is what Wright continues to confront and trouble.
His habi t is that of the pilgrim on a spiri tual itinerary, at times open-heart–
ed, at times flint-hearted to the journey and to the sojourn.
Sadness reigns over the lyric intricacies of these medi tations. This
eschatological melancholia imbues
Black Zodiac
with a weight, gravity, and
