by
Charles Wright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hardcover, 76 pages, $20
ISBN 0-374-11728-4
Charles
Wright is a poet from
All
my life I ve listened for the dark speech of silence,
And
now, every night,
I
hear a slight murmur, a slow rush,
My blood setting out on its long journey beyond the skin.
The juxtaposition of long and short lines, the flowing of the line to its natural end-point rather than artificially breaking it creates a rhythm not often felt in contemporary poetry. While these short vignettes rise powerfully off the page, they are loosely connected to one another, separated by only a long dash on the page, such that the poems are greater in their small parts, becoming a greater whole by the process of accretion. There is no easy meaning here, while the sound and substance of each phrase, each line, each stanza flows clearly in and of themselves, often thick with subtle allusions, such as this nod to T.S. Eliot s The Wasteland:
How
beautiful summer is,
unclottable darkness
Seeping
across the landscape
Like
blood from a hemophiliac.
How
strong the heart is to entertain such loveliness.
How
stringent the stars are,
spreading
their welcome across the sky.
Passport
stamped the barrier lifting, how easily one is gathered.
Where Eliot imagined the sky like a patient anesthetized, Wright s darkening sky is the blood of the patient; yet the mood is not nihilsm but more a welcome journey, even if it is the last journey, with the resulting tone and spirit the antithesis of Eliot s work. To emphasize this, Wright breaks his lines a pattern of his, and used to good effect briefly slowing but continuing the flow and rhythm while focusing on a certain phrase or precise image and drawing the reader s eye through the poem, as here:
Like
memory, night is kind to us,
Erasing
idle details.
Circumference,
for instance. Or linearity.
Astronomy
starts to make some sense, and verticality.
Like
sediment, inch after inch, we rise toward the stars.
There is a timeless quality to this poetry, perhaps distantly connected to the ancient Chinese poets admired by Wright, although connected more in the timelessness of their inherent nature than in form or style or subject matter, with such timelessness centered in the idea that the only thing permanent for us is a greater and unfathomable universe so far from our reach and comprehension that we can only focus on the impermanence of our short lives:
Stars
are here when we come and stars are here when we go.
No
one will ever know their secrets,
no
one will break their codes,
So
absent and all at once,
where all things are forgot.
Such useless change in our pants pockets, such dried flowers.
This is poetry to read in an open field, to feel the words on your tongue, to let it drop down through your bones. It is, as Wright describes in Wednesday Morning, a stillness across the morning, a sudden absence of something, and grain through our fingers.
Under
our heads, the world is a long drop and an ache.
Above
us, the sky forks,
great road to the left, great road to the
right.
It is Wright s genius that he can take us down both roads at once.
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