Falls the shadow. (Verse chronicle).(6 books of poetry)

A Short History of the Shadow (1) is a pendant to Charles Wright's Appalachian Book of the Dead, the three trilogies that took him a quarter-century to complete. The new poems are written in the sketchy, hither-thither manner, like the musings of a man waking from anaesthesia, into which Wrights hard early style has gradually softened. He has enough irony left to realize how close that style has grown (except in ambition) to the junk pile of Pound's Cantos. You could almost rewrite Wright's diaries, if you'd been careless enough to use them for kindling, from the daybook entries here.

Wright's specialty is romantic vision (you suspect he'd see himself as a visionary, if he weren't so modest and afflicted with doubt)--he finds the sublime in the unlikeliest places, and at his best makes you think such places are exactly where to look. Much of the time he writes of his back yard or the room where he sits, which shows a telling humility as well as paralyzing laziness--a writer who can't be bothered to stir from his chair is soon writing odes to his desk lamp. When Wright describes the "Orange Crush sunset over the Blue Ridge" or "Cold like a shot of Novocain/ under the week's gums," the images thrust pastoral into the modern world. You think of Homer's wine-dark sea, or Dante comparing Geryon's skin to Tartar cloth--the familiar objects tame the foreign, even in Hell, and the domestic is afterwards left a little unfamiliar. (When Wright spies a "handful of Alzheimered apple trees," however, you're sorry Dr. Alzheimer ever discovered a disease.)

 
   Twilight twisting down like a slow screw 
   Into the balsa wood of Saturday afternoon, 
   Late Saturday afternoon, 
   a solitary plane 
   Eating its way like a moth across the bolt of 
   dusk 
   Hung like cheesecloth above us. 

Wright has long been a poet of gorgeous description, so I feel churlish pointing out that twilight rises from the ground and that moth larvae, not moths, eat fabric. Homer or Dante would have bothered to get these things right. Too many of these poems sink into the portentous tone that passes for wisdom in contemporary poetry. Wright is quick to invoke the "abyss," to summon the "other world"--he settles for a beachcomber's philosophizing with a swig of metaphysical sentiment. There's more poeticizing than poetry here, as in the trilogies that preceded it, which are no more a long poem than Wrights dimestore metaphysics (when a poem's going badly, a few angels get thrown in) is real metaphysics.

 
   Our world is of little moment, of course, but 
   it is our world. 
   Thus it behooves us to contemplate, 
   from time to time, 
   The weight of glory we should wish reset in 
   our hearts, 
   About the things which are seen, 
   and things which are not seen, 
   That corresponds like to like, 
   The stone to the dark of the earth, the flame 
   to the star. 

Behooves us! The weight of glory! Robert Lowell in his madness believed he was Milton. Wright in his sanity is willing to settle for Henry Ward Beecher.

These gentlemanly Southern poems lie drowsily on the page, as if the poet had handed you a mint julep and invited you into a hammock. When a poet admits he's "getting too old and lazy to write poems," the prognosis isn't good. Any reader who wants to take Wright seriously, who wants to revel in the naked beauty of descriptions that rival even Pound's (when people say they love parts of The Cantos, what they love are the landscapes), must put up with more eternities and immensities and everlastings than you could shake a stick at. Wright likes to drop the names of poets with imaginations morally more serious than his own (Vallejo, Machado, Mandelstam, Lorca, Alberti, Rimbaud)--this seems a quiet form of self-mortification. All he can offer in return are lines like "We yo-yo the Absolute big-time," which may be the worst metaphysical line ever written.