reviewed by Steve Littlejohn

When I was reading these poems my next door neighbour, who is a troubled soul, was effing and blinding, cursing no one at the top of his voice. He was alone and very angry. It is like this almost every night and worrying about him takes me to some dark places. Charles Wright had this to say:

                        Under the low hum of the sweet bees,

                        Under the hair-heavy hoof of the warrior ant,

                        Under the towering shadows he must go through,

                                                                                                       and surface from,

                        Under the beetle's breast and the grub's,

                        The future is setting it's table,

                                                                        it's cutlery dark, its mirrors anxious and blank.

Most of his poems have this kind of transforming effect. Descriptions of the weather turn into meditations, suffused with memories. Old friends will turn up and he thinks about them for a while, things they may have seen together or thoughts they might have shared. I was seduced by it because it offers slowness, and a world in which enlightenment exists. If only you know where to look.

                        These days, I look at things, not through them,

                        And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get.

                        The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral,

                        The neighbour's back porch lightbulbs glow like anemones.

We are cajoled, gently, into looking. But there are matters of the spirit also to be considered,

                        The white eyelids of dead boys, like flushed birds, flutter up

                        At the edge of the timber.

                        Domestic Lupin Crayolas the yard.

                                                                                Slow lopes of tall grasses

                        Southbound in the meadow, hurled along by the wind.

                        In wingbeats and increments,

                        The disappeared come back to us, the soul returns to the tree.

This, from a section titled Relics, in a poem called Nine-Panel Yaak River Screen shows Wright's preoccupation with the image inside the image inside the image, and with art itself. Everything described becomes an Icon and it betrays an underlying solipsism which runs through all of the work. I have nothing against this but, like with Buddhism, I can't manage to keep my head there for any great period of time. The poems then become poems of the self rather than of the landscapes they describe and I feel as though I'm being told too often that this is what's going on:

                        We all have our ways of keeping the Buddha alive

                        As he comes forth, a common pilgrim, out of the thick forest.

                        We all have our ways of directing the sacrificial horse

                        Back to the place of sacrifice,

                                                                        as if he'd appeared

                        By chance, though guided, the Indians say, like Buddha imperceptibly.

                        And there's his arrangement in the sky.

                        And here's his arrangement on the ground,

                                                                                            pleasure of the without,

                        Brittle and secondary February bloom stalks,

                        Trees leafless and shadowless

                        Just under Orion, just west of the Pleiades.

This alignment with Buddhism, for me, diminishes the work because it ties the poet to a world view he didn't invent. Wright doesn't struggle with his God. The reader is not brought to Buddhism, Buddhism is brought to the reader and that always brings with it the ambience of a commercial. Wright doesn't hit us over the head with it but once the Buddha gets inside something its not easy to get rid of him..

Another thing which niggled me slightly was an absence of normal people. Those who do crop up are either dead writers or others who have been carefully chosen in order for the poet to access some thorny philosophical or spiritual issue. Wright's world is classless in a slightly naive, middle-class-intellectual kind of way. Whenever anguish appears, you can't escape the feeling that his version of it tends to be something that happens when you get writer's block:

                        It has been said there is an end to the giving out of names.

                        It has been said that everything that's written has grown hollow.

                        It has been said that scorpions dance where language falters and gives way.

                        It has been said that something shines out from every darkness,

                                                                                                that something shines out.

                        Leaning against the invisible, we bend and nod.

                        Evening arranges itself around the fallen leaves

                        Alphabetized across the back yard,

                                                                               desolate syllables

                        That braille us and sign us, leaning against the invisible.

It leaves you with the impression that reality is being skirted around. That being said, it's clear that Wright has chosen to do this. He makes the things he looks at resonate and if his world is smaller, it is filled with beautiful things. God peeps at us through the gap between one petal and the next. It deepens our own perceptions, forces us to look hard at the crap we have splashing around in our own heads. For myself, I would be happy to live my life with only this thought in my head:

                        Can the right word ring, O my,  forever in the ear?

It's not my fate, alas, to be permitted such an uncluttered mind. I couldn't help comparing Wright, at times, with William Carlos Williams. There are certain similarities - Wright isn't by any means an insignificant poet - but Williams shook things until they fell to pieces in his hand and he laughed ruggedly at the bits. Wright is perhaps just too sensible, too considered.