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PARTISAN REVIEW
magnitude of wisdom, delivered, at times, with the wit of truth plainly
said:
If God hurt the way we hurt,
he, too, would be heart-sore
Disconsolate, unappeasable.
In
Black Zodiac,
one finds a solitary figure, an observer who contemplates
the instability of memory. The philosophical, the theological, and the ele–
mental are, at once, his way and his subject.
Wright is a collector of landscapes. Through iteration and through
metaphor, he continually changes what is before his eyes and thus adds to
his holdings. He builds to destroy to rebuild. The answer he seeks, he
knows, is there
in
the landscape or accessible
through
the landscape, but is
not yet found, not yet revealed. As a result, the meditations open in circles
outward, attempting both to preserve what cannot be preserved-the past
and the future-and to transcend it:
John Ruskin says all clouds are masses of light, even the darkest ones.
Hard to remember that these overcast afternoons,
Midweek, ash-black and ash-white,
negative shapes stretched in
And luminous here and there in loose interstices
Elbowed and stacked between earth and sky.
Hard to remember that as the slipstream of memory shifts
And shutters, massing what wasn't there as though it were.
Where are the secret codes these days for nuking the Brenner Pass?
And the Run, and the Trieste Station?
Like sculptured mist, sharp-edged and cut into form, they slide on by.
One only writes in order to erase again ...
Although each of his poems stands firmly on its own, one could read
Wright's new collection as an ambitious single lyric sequence that is
expansive, rigorous, and incandescent.
Gnosis
is the destination of Wright's
poems, but the path they offer is by no means spare or ascetic. Few poets
can conjure as well-wrought a line as Charles Wright, and even fewer can
offer lines that grow more beautiful, more complex, and more true each
time we return to them.
