Volume 10 51
scape.” He moves through the afternoon into
evening, from oppressive heat to a late summer rain
shower, philosophizing on religion, death, and
memory, but always including a layer of nature—
what color the sky is, what the wildlife is doing,
how hot it is, etc. This is because human beings are
inseparable from the natural environment. We de-
pend on it, and it depends on us. Rather than ig-
nore that fact, Wright is a poet who incorporates,
blends, and layers landscape, waterscape, and sky-
scape into nearly everything he writes. He com-
pares abstractions such as “masters” and “memo-
ries” to a summer breeze: “They ruffle our hair, /
they ruffle the leaves of the August trees. / Then
stop, abruptly as wind.” In this poem, insects have
an afterlife and stars are “space graffiti, white holes
/ In the landscape.” The poet insists that we write
down our observations or else we’ll forget them or
memory will distort them. Given this, he sometimes
simply records what he sees and hears: “Spider at
work between the hedges, / Last bird call, / toad in
a damp place, tree frog in a dry.” As evening comes
on and daylight fades, the stars begin to appear,
some of them perhaps the souls of the “disembod-
ied”: “Above us, the great constellations sidle and
wince, / The letters undarken and come forth.”
“Black Zodiac” ends with yet another blend of the
abstract and the concrete. The notion of “descrip-
tion” is likened to the very real and very natural el-
ements of air and water. Regardless of the theo-
logical or philosophical twists and turns that a
Wright poem takes, one sure foundation is the pres-
ence of nature.
Language and Expression
Perhaps the most dominant theme in “Black
Zodiac” is that of language itself. While it may be
obvious that any writer, regardless of genre, is con-
cerned about creative, interesting, or accurate ex-
pression, Wright goes an extra step in turning that
concern into a quest. He is constantly in pursuit of
the “right” phrase or the “right” word. Sometimes
he finds it and does not hesitate to point it out. In
“Black Zodiac” the word is “element,” and the last
line says so. Ironically, in this poem the search for
the right description involves looking for a way to
describe description itself. But long before the end
of the poem, Wright displays his language crusade
with remarkable, unlikely imagery. The hot sum-
mer afternoon “Teeters a bit on its green edges”
and the “gates of mercy, like an eclipse, darken our
undersides.” Instead of portraying the outline of an
early evening moon as pale or vague, he calls it
“prejaundiced,” not yet bright and yellow in the
sky. The clouds are not simply moving across the
heavens, nor racing, nor drifting—they are
“sculling downsky.” A scull is a long oar used to
propel a boat through water, so, here Wright em-
ploys a nautical term and a play on the word “down-
stream.” Considering the poem ends with rain mov-
ing in, this line is a forecast for what is to come.
Another example of the poet not settling for com-
mon verbiage is his description of the emerging
constellation as the stars and planets become visi-
ble. The heavenly bodies do not merely twinkle—
they “sidle and wince.” Clearly, Wright’s search
for unique expression is often rewarded, and he
proves over and over the essential connection be-
tween language and all that we do, all that we think,
and all that exists.Style.
At first glance, Wright’s poetry may appear highly
unstructured, composed of long meandering lines
that are sometimes complete sentences and some-
times just strings of phrases. While long lines and
phrase groups are certainly present in his poems, a
close look also reveals a very carefully constructed
work, even mathematical in some instances.
Wright’s typical “divisor” is three. “Black Zodiac”
is made up of 73 lines—six stanzas with 12 lines
each. Even entire collections are grouped into what
Wright calls “triptychs,” a term more often used in
the art world to describe three painted or carved
panels that are hinged together. In literature, three
books in a series is considered a “trilogy.” To date,
Wright has composed three triptychs, the most re-
cent consisting of Chickamauga, Black Zodiac,and
Appalachia.The style of poetry in these three
books is very similar, as are the themes, most no-
tably God, landscape, and language.
Language, of course, has already been heavily
discussed in this article, but its use and its results
are at the very core of the poem’s style as well as
its themes. In Wright’s collection of “improvisa-
tions and interviews” called Halflife,he has this to
say about expressing himself on paper: “Mostly I
like the sound of words. The sound, the feel, the
paint, the color of them. I like to hear what they
can do with each other. I like layers of paint on the
canvas.” In regard to the structure of entire lines,
Wright mentions that, “a well-known poet once
said to me, ‘I don’t worry about the ends of my
lines. I feel if the beginnings are good, the ends
will take care of themselves.’ Wrong. They will
not. Things have ends as well as beginnings. TheBlack Zodiac