Chickamauga

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As he juggles his inquiries about language, landscape, memory, and God throughout the six groups of short poems that make up Chickamauga, Wright refuses to reach for the easy conclusion. In this, his poems embody Keats’s notion of “negative capability”: the ability to consider multiple concepts without “irritably reaching after fact.” “We’re placed between now and not-now,” as he writes in “Reading Lao Tzu Again in the New Year.” Wright’s scope is admirably broad, and he endows the familiar with new shadows. In “Sprung Narratives” he considers what he’s learned in the 30 years since a trip to Italy, and concludes, “Unlike a disease, whatever I’ve learned / Is not communicable.” Instead of trying to explain with a vocabulary wherein “each word / Is a failure,” Wright tells himself to:

Sit still and lengthen your lines,
Shorten your poems and listen to what the darkness says
With its mouthful of cold air.

Born in Tennessee in 1935, Wright now teaches at the University of Virginia. He grounds his mystic’s poetry in a Southerner’s physical world. But like Charlie Citrine, hero of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, Wright betrays provincial expectations by inquiring into the most subtle and nuanced states. The grace one finds in Wright’s poems is universal; his Blue Ridge easily becomes Mt. Fuji, Mt. Olympus, or Kilimanjaro. A craftsman, he understands the limits of his tools. In “Aftermath,” for instance, he confides, “We who would see beyond seeing / see only language, that burning field.” Through his rarefied country music, though, Wright holds out a branch of hope: “Loss is its own gain. / Its secret is emptiness.”