Volume 10 53
or freedom and restriction—may be the strongest
evidence of cultural influence on Wright and his
work, from the beginnings of his life through the
writing of the poem and ever since. Brought up in
the “Bible belt” and remaining there until after col-
lege graduation, Wright must have felt the common
tug between strict, religious conservatism and the
temptations of secular curiosity and desire. The
poem “Black Zodiac” demonstrates both the long-
ing to be wayward, or free, with thoughts and ac-
tions, as well as the compressing, or restricted, ten-
dencies that seem inescapable. The speaker offers
a religiously charged quote: “Those who look for
the Lord will cry out in praise of him”—and then
immediately interjects his own opinion: “Perhaps.
And perhaps not.” He flirts with the idea of an as-
trological afterlife in which our souls light up as
letters in the constellation, and yet God is not out
of the picture—as star-letters, we become his
“word-wards.” Beyond the southern influence any
further attempt to date and place “Black Zodiac”
would be superfluous and far-reaching. Consider-
ing the intellectual and creative intricacies of the
bulk of Wright’s work, we cannot find fault with
an indeterminate setting.
Critical Overview.
Wright’s poetry has been highly praised from early
publications on. His second book Hard Freightwas
nominated for a National Book Award and received
a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a
Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards.
Most critics have given a thumbs up for Wright’s
style, pointing to the layering of fragmented im-
ages and the shifting/blending of dominant themes
as very interesting to “watch” as well as just read.
Black Zodiac,in particular, has drawn favorable at-
tention, as much for its intriguing subject matter as
for its striking language. In a review of the collec-
tion in America,critic Robert Ellis Hosmer Jr. ad-
dresses the speaker who presents a consistent voice
throughout the book: “[t]he voice we become ac-
customed to hearing often expresses hesitation, am-
bivalence, contradiction and doubt. At the same
time, the narrator acknowledges that there is “great
radiance.” Every single notated element in these
poems has no importance greater than pointing be-
yond.” Many other critics picked up on the “look-
ing beyond” aspect of Black Zodiac,comparing it
to the tendency to “look backward” in the previous
collection Chickamauga.
Wright’s technique of piling up images, how-
ever, is not praised by all critics. Some have com-
plained that the poet tries so hard to find the “right”
language that he ends up sacrificing quality for
quantity. Because many of his poems contain
themes that wind in and out of one another, some
readers find him confusing at best, boring at worst.
In spite of these charges, however, Wright is one
of the nation’s most prolific poets, and his positive
critics far outnumber the negative.Criticism.
Greg Barnhisel
Barnhisel holds a Ph.D in American literature.
In this essay, he examines how Charles Wright re-
sponds, in “Black Zodiac,” to the question of what
relationship a poet should have to the material
world, especially the world of nature. He also dis-
cusses how Wright, in answering that question, en-
ters into a conversation with such predecessor po-
ets as Wordsworth, Keats, and Wallace Stevens
about these topics.In her 1988 book The Music of What Happens,
the eminent critic Helen Vendler writes of Charles
Wright that “Wright’s poetry reproduces the cir-
cling and deepening concentration that aims at ei-
ther obliteration or transcendence, blankness or
mysticism. But Wright stops short of either polar-
ity because he remains bound to the materiality and
temporal rhythm of language, whereas both East-
ern nothingness and Western transcendence, at
their utmost point, renounce as meaningless both
materiality and time.” For Vendler, Wright’s po-
etry attempts to come to a resting-place between
the desire for nothingness, for obliteration, and the
desire to transcend or go beyond the material world.
Wright ends up accepting and even embracing the
material world, but without the uncritical admira-
tion characteristic of such poets as Wordsworth.
“Black Zodiac,” the title poem of his 1997 collec-
tion, illustrates and describes the answers that
Wright comes up with to the poetic dilemma of
obliteration or transcendence.
Probably at no point have poets’ attitudes to-
ward nature and toward artistic representation of
nature changed so much as during the Romantic
period of approximately 1760-1830. A long tradi-
tion of nature poetry existed, of course, before the
Romantics; the Greek pastoral elegy, for instance,
survived the Greeks to become popular among theBlack Zodiac