Customer Reviews

Black Zodiac

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I am new to Wright's work, but in very little time, I felt like an old familiar. Critics will call his subject matter what they will--Wright's characteristic "issues," "concerns," obsessions," "interests," "passions"--and will either praise or damn him for working/reworking/rerereworking related materials. I found many powerful images powerfully rendered, and instances of beautiful writing. Wright is, moreover, a fine aphorist and a cunning dialectician--"What we refuse defines us"--who will appeal to those who toiled to master those difficult authors. That said, overall, Black Zodiac in my estimation falls well short of meriting the almost universal acclaim accorded by the professional poetry fraternity/sorority (it is wholly unoriginal of me to observe that this is a customary rewark bestowed on the work of long persevering colleagues). Wright gives us entirely too much on his personal sacrifice: the impossibility of poetry, the indescribability of a nature and landscapes that surpass our small rhetorical ability to encompass, the hackneyed insistence that "a line of poetry's a line of blood" (Yes, YES! Fight on, regardless of the toll one's fragile psyche must endure), on custodianship of The Word, on the meaninglessness of it all, despite...and still. Come on. I'd like to read more of Charles Wright's work, and will--if only to try to get to the place where Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, and others of his admirers view him--and I expect to encounter his "characteristic subject matter": landscapes, clouds, ash (and lots of it), -wash, Chinoiserie, light/dark juxtapositions, recollection and loss, and ruminations on meaninglessness and mortality that come knee-high to Philip Larkin's second best writing. But I also expect a payoff in beautifully sculpted phrases and a few aphoristic nuggets.

Charles Wright, while the 20th century was settling down to its own special oblivion, silently has become one of America's most important poets. His love for language is always evident in his writing. I have come to welcome his poetry into my world. I know that before I am through with a Wright poem I will come across a line so perfect I will want to weep. Black Zodiac, in keeping with Wright's upward surge, is a brilliant piece of work. This volume is part 2 of a trilogy he began with Chicamauga. Years from today the world will look upon Wright as, perhaps, America's most important poet and surely will consider Black Zodiac as one of his most important works.

Precisely what's wrong with most poetry written in the university. P-p-p-painful.