Charles Wright’s poetry is the last refuge of nineteenth-century oratory—his overwrought syntax is its own religion. In early books he tried on various styles like a man changing hats. He never made any of the hats his own, and the hats never made him their own, either—they were just hats. For the past decade, as middle age has become mortal, his poems have settled into loose, baggy journals heavily influenced by Ezra Pound. The sea-chop of rhythm, the epigrammatic line, the snatch of foreign language—all are the lost property of a great flawed poet.
Through language, strict attention—
Verona mi fe’, disfecemi Verona, the song goes.
I’ve hummed it, I’ve bridged the breakTo no avail.
April. The year begins beyondwords,
Beyond myself and the image of myself,beyond
Moon’s ice and summer’s thunder. All that.
The style seems less an homage than a way of avoiding argument.
Black Zodiac[1]opens with an “Apologia pro vita sua”—it’s not often a poet is drawn to Cardinal Newman these days. If there’s a religious crisis here, it is beyond the reach of style. The poems are usually arranged in short, unattached sections with only the most distracted relation to one another; they stop and start, and get mired in metaphysics. When a poet sinks into his attitudes, mortal thoughts are near; and if he writes, “Time is the source of all good,/ time the engenderer/ Of entropy
