Charles Wright is an old, old hand now, still hammering out, as he has for decades, meditations on life, liberty, and the pursuit of angels.1 He doesn’t deal in country wisdom—only wisdom countrified, the way every suburb south of Canada and north of Mexico has a bar with a roaring trade in cowboy hats and cowboy boots. At worst, Wright’s poems offer wisdom shtick that at the upper end competes with W. S. Merwin’s free-floating ramblings and at the lower Mary Oliver’s doggy pastoral:
No darkness steps out of the woods, no angel appears.
I listen, no word, I look, no thing.
Eternity must be hiding back there, it’s done so before.I can wait, or I can climb,
Like Orpheus, through the slick organs of my body.
“Slick organs” is a wonderful touch that almost rescues the sentiment of the rest. Such musings never sound all that deep, and they’re never as deep as they sound—the tone is rarely raised or lowered, the lines droning on like an electric substation.
Wright turns seventy-nine this year, and it’s a pity that he’s lost the capacity, not just to surprise the reader, but to surprise himself. How much you’d give for a little glee, or for the smack of rage! (Think of Pound’s fury even into his eighties.) The anger that muscled into Wright’s early poems is a dead memory now. He has pared away the rough-hewn past to live in the
