Richard Rand, a critic writing for theHar-
vard Review, commented on the greater transpar-
ency that came into Wright’s poetry in the years
just prior to the publication of this collection:
‘‘He now offers plenty of elbow room with
space for both his own and the reader’s imagina-
tion.’’ The book is ‘‘challenging, companionable,
pointedly repetitive, and ultimately, rewarding.’’
Rand concluded thatBuffalo Yogais ‘‘a major
exercise of and for the imagination’’ and that ‘‘it
would be difficult these days to find a book that
comes close to it in energy or engagement.’’
CRITICISMLois Kerschen
Kerschen is an educator and freelance writer. In
this essay, she discusses Wright’s use of landscape,
particularly in ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All
Things.’’
Wright’s poetry seeks to fill those empty
spaces in the heart that all people have. For
Wright, the material for this solace comes from
landscape, which stimulates the imagination and
provides images and metaphors he conjures or
reinvents for his poetry.
Willard Spiegelman inHow Poets See the
World: The Art of Description in Contemporary
Poetrystates that ‘‘Wright has developed and
maintained a poetic persona.’’ This persona is a
mask that can best be defined ‘‘through his use of
context, place, situation, anecdote, and natural
description.... Framing himself within a recol-
lected or perceived landscape, he enacts a pil-
grimage toward self-portraiture by painting
himselfintothe landscape.’’
A telltale sign that Wright would agree with
Spiegelman is in Wright’s choice of epigraph
for hisChina Trace (1977), a quotation that
might serve as a thesis statement for all of his
books. Attributed to the sixteenth-century Chi-
nese writer named T’u Lung (also known as T’u
Ch’ihshui), the epigraph states: ‘‘being unable to
find peace within myself, I made use of the exter-
nal surroundings to calm my spirit, and being
unable to find delight within my heart, I bor-
rowed a landscape to please it.’’ It should be
noted that neither poet is referring to landscapes
in the sense of nature as used by the romantics.
Rather, landscape is more a panorama, the
whole scene instead of a particular aspect of it.
WHAT
DO I READ
NEXT?Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for
Black Zodiac: Poems (1998), in which he
explores major truths, both reverently and
irreverently, through landscapes and language.
Walt Whitman’s poetry has influenced
Wright’s work. Whitman’s work is collected
inWalt Whitman: Selected Poems(2001).
This book contains the poet’s major works
and is a good introduction to one of the
architects of modern American poetry.
Emily Dickinson is one of Wright’s favorite
poets. Her poems can be found inThe Col-
lected Poems of Emily Dickinson(Barnes and
Nobel, 2003). This edition includes com-
mentary, background information, study
questions, bibliography, and a glossary.
Wright began his career in poetry when he
read the works of the highly influential
American poet and critic Ezra Pound, the
founder of the imagist movement. A collec-
tion of seventy of Pound’s poems, Early
Poems, was published as a Dover Thrift edi-
tion in 1996.
The Invisible Ladder: An Anthology of Con-
temporary American Poems for Young Read-
ers, edited by Liz Rosenberg and published
in 1996 by Henry Holt, is sophisticated yet
designed to appeal to teenage and adult
readers. The poems are accompanied by
photographs and comments by the poets
about how they got interested in this form
of writing.
In ‘‘Words Are the Diminution of All
Things,’’ Wright contemplates the end of
life. By contrast, the eighty-five poems in
Life Doesn’t Frighten Me at Allask young
people to face the good and bad of life
ahead. Most of the poems are from modern
American writers such as Maya Angelou,
but some come from earlier times and writ-
ers of different cultures and ethnicities; all
were chosen because they are relevant to
teenage lives.Words Are the Diminution of All Things