THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 83
Always the black angel asleep on my lips,
always
The dove’s moan in the mimosa tree,
The blue faces of the twice transfigured
closing their stone eyes.
The quotation is from Pound’s “Blan-
dula, Tenula, Vagula,” a poem inspired
by the famous last words of Emperor
Hadrian. Everything in Wright is “twice
transfigured” in this way, a quotation of
a quotation, an image of an image. “I
find myself in my own image,” Wright
reports, “and am neither and both./ I
come and go in myself as though from
room to room.” A poet like Wright finds
himself only in prior acts of represen-
tation, as in “a photograph of me tak-
ing a photograph/ Of Holly and me.”
O
ne way of using this big book is
as the longitudinal presentation of
a sensibility, its fluctuations plotted on
a decades-long graph. These patterns
are harder to spot in Wright’s individ-
ual volumes, so a retrospective arrange-
ment is, in a way, a new composition,
not merely a highlight reel. Wright’s
poems often begin by settling into an
uneventful scene or routine, decorated
with trophies of the past, as in “Look-
ing Around,” from his 2002 collection,
“A Short History of the Shadow”:
I sit where I always sit,
northwest window on Basin Creek,
A homestead cabin from 1912,
Pine table knocked together some 30 years
ago,
Indian saddle blanket, Peruvian bedspread
And Mykonos woven rug
nailed up on the log walls.
Several poems in the volume begin this
way, each with a slightly different set of
talismans. The poems furnish an ele-
gant bachelor space, a man cave with
soft touches and a long prospect on the
past, in which Wright’s memories, like
lightning bugs, appear.
Wright’s chronology notes the pass-
ing dates and seasons and, perhaps less
often than one would expect, some per-
sonal and cultural milestones. But he
advances while facing backward, drift-
ing away from the points of origin that
he seems more and more keen to re-
cover the further he goes along. An
early poem, “The Southern Cross,” sug-
gests how Wright’s childhood memo-
ries must contend with gaps and lapses,
as in a photo album:
It’s 1936, in Tennessee. I’m one
And spraying the dead grass with a hose.
The curtains blow in and out.
And then it’s not. I’m not and they’re not.
Or it’s 1941 in a brown suit, or ’53 in its
white shoes,
Overlay after overlay tumbled and brought
back,
As meaningless as the sea would be
if the sea could remember its waves ...
In this static scene, the curtains intro-
duce movement and change. Suddenly
we’re racing, “overlay after overlay,”
through Wright’s youth: age six, age
eighteen. A 2004 poem, “My Own Lit-
tle Civil War,” reconstructs an even
more distant scene, of Wright’s an-
cestors in Sullivan County, “the only
county in Tennessee that did not se-
cede/Throughout the entire Civil War.”
Because these poems are both pro-
gressive and recursive, the present mo-
ment, with its “armchair and omelette,”
is already hoary. Nothing in Wright’s
work is ever new: in “A Journal of En-
glish Days,” Wright thinks of Paul
Cézanne in Provence, who “died there
today/ Seventy-seven years ago, Octo-
ber 22”; several lines and several days
later, “Sunday, October 30th,” he re-
members “Pound’s birthday ninety-
eight years ago,” before ending with a
“Short Riff for John Keats’s 188th Birth-
day.” In this jumbled time line, Pound’s
famous dictate “Make it new!” gets re-
drawn in his disciple’s work:
Redundancies of the spring peach trees.
Old fires, old geographies.
In that case, make it old, I say, make it
singular
In its next resurrection,
White violets like photographs on the
tombstone of the yard.
Once time is set up this way, we
become contemporaries of our own
ancestors. At moments, Wright’s work
feels like an enormous, timeless front
porch, where long-lost friends like
Lao Tzu drop by: “the masters, like
our memories, mix/ And mismatch,
and settle about our lawn furniture,
like air.”
W
right’s later poems attain vi-
sionary intensities, fusing be-
lief and deflation. His gregarious as-
ceticism—asceticism over drinks, as it
were—bears traces of Dante, St. Ig-
natius, Augustine, and the Buddha.
These solemn figures make rather jaunty
appearances in the work, but none of
them seem to me to be the source of
its charisma. Instead, it’s the lightness
that I value most in Wright’s work.
Often, he’ll begin in the key of pon-
tification, then slide into friendliness.
“Everything comes from something,
only something comes from nothing,”
he writes, then adds, “Lao Tzu says,
more or less./ Eminently sensible, I
s a y. ” O r :
Augustine says
This is what we desire,
The soul itself instinctively desires it.
He’s right, of course.
This isn’t mysticism—it’s chitchat. It
looses Augustine back into the cultural
stream, a favor that Wright has done
for so many of his literary and spiri-
tual mentors. In a Wright poem, you
might find out what Freud wrote about
Leonardo’s little wax animals, so light
that the wind would carry them away.
These details aren’t quite a narrative
(Wright has claimed to be the rare
Southerner who can’t tell stories); they
enter the poem, then leave it, as casual,
beautiful reminders of the fact that we
die, and that art has a chance to out-
live us.
A book this huge had better be
excellent company. Wright—with his
sometimes cantankerous affection,
his sympathy for the reader who has, as
he has, seen and heard this all before—
is profoundly companionable. Within
the repetitive cycles of his verse we find
the loveliest surprises: an afternoon in
the cupola at Emily Dickinson’s house,
the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet,
the “sizzle like E.T.’s finger,” the “af-
ternoon undervoices” of kids playing
red rover.
Immersed in these poems, we don’t
find “knowledge or truth”; instead,
like Wright standing mute beside
Pound in Venice, “we get no closer
than next-to-it.” Wright paraphrases
the hilariously named philosopher
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,
writing that “the definer of all things”
is “beyond wisdom, beyond denial.”
His judgment of this philosophy is
one that I share, and would apply to
Wright’s own poetry: it all “sounds
good to me.”
