A Short History of the Shadow[1] is a pendant to Charles Wright’s Appalachian Book of the Dead, the three trilogies that took him a quarter-century to complete. The new poems are written in the sketchy, hither-thither manner, like the musings of a man waking from anaesthesia, into which Wright’s hard early style has gradually softened. He has enough irony left to realize how close that style has grown (except in ambition) to the junk pile of Pound’s Cantos. You could almost rewrite Wright’s diaries, if you’d been careless enough to use them for kindling, from the daybook entries here.

Wright’s specialty is romantic vision (you suspect he’d see himself as a visionary, if he weren’t so modest and afflicted with doubt) —he finds the sublime in the unlikeliest places, and at his best makes you think such places are exactly where to look. Much of the time he writes of his back yard or the room where he sits, which shows a telling humility as well as paralyzing laziness—a writer who can’t be bothered to stir from his chair is soon writing odes to his desk lamp. When Wright describes the “Orange Crush sunset over the Blue Ridge” or “Cold like a shot of Novocain/ under the week’s gums,” the images thrust pastoral into the modern world. You think of Homer’s wine-dark sea, or Dante comparing Geryon’s skin to Tartar cloth—the familiar objects tame the foreign, even in Hell, and the domestic is afterwards left a