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There is no sickness of spirit like homesickness
When what you are sick for
                                             has never been seen or heard
In this world, or even remembered
                                             except as a smear of bleached light
Opening, closing beyond any alphabet’s
Recall to witness and isolate...

Charles Wright’s ‘A Journal of English Days’ is set in London. Wright was born in Tennessee, educated in North Carolina and Iowa, teaches in Virginia and is often included among the rollcall of regional writers. His lyric affinities are largely grounded in Italy, where he served a military tour and has lived as a Fulbright scholar, translating Italian poets. The notes to his poetry indicate a relationship to Eastern religions, Chinese aesthetics, French painting and sculpture, Greek mathematics, Latin American surrealism, German theology and philosophy, and other sources from innumerable regions. He is among the most explicitly eclectic of contemporary poets.

     His formidably cross-referenced poetry is no less indebted to the so-called English Metaphysicals, including the wavy line that runs from Traherne and Vaughan through Hopkins, Wordsworth and even the anglicized T.S. Eliot, yet his work is underrepresented in England. Wright’s poetry is unmistakeably American in diction, form and texture, yet relentlessly cosmopolitan in subject matter and learning. A pastoral verse endowed with a humble sophistication, it has not received much attention in the U.K., where its nearest resemblance is John Burnside’s mythical, mystical delving into the elements. Naming his enterprise as “language, landscape and the idea of God”, Wright may be working in a space of solitude and spiritual investigation no longer mapped by the English sensibility.

     The problematic indexing of lineage and place are particularly relevant when considering Wright’s poetry, since his work is driven by the dialectics of source and destination. He has spoken of poetry as a journey which approaches an end it never fully achieves: “What you have to say is where you have to go...you’re not there yet, you know; you never get there”. While he distances himself from the strictures of orthodox Christianity, Wright nevertheless composes in an idiom influenced by religious upbringing. Nostalgic for a lexicon and accompanying set of convictions no longer applicable or fashionable, he persists in voicing his dual impulses of unsettlement and self-fulfilment. Unable to consistently place his confidence in a recognised faith, Wright turns to the natural world, where biological conservation informs his restlessness and “allurements of the eye” engage both his curiosity and suspicion.

     Wright establishes himself between the quotidian, of which he is a stringent and compassionate observer, and another, more distant realm: “I write from the point of view of a monk in his cell”, he admits, “sometimes I look at the stones, sometimes I look out the window”. His work undertakes a “looking hard” at this temporary home as well as at a further one, original and ultimate: “We walk with one foot in each world, the isness of everything/ Like a rock in each shoe, the way, and along-the-way”. His poems are now listless, now urgent peregrinations with myriad byways, and he continually attempts to refine his concentration into an asceticism fuelled by untravelled distance but capable of arrival. “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul”, he writes after The Cloud of Unknowing, and his poetry consciously emulates the Spiritual Exercises, in which the exercitant is more concerned with praying than preaching.

     The poems from Zone Journals (1988) and Xionia (1990) are Ignatian in their meticulous detailing of exact dates and locales. Assuming the form of diary entries, poems such as the uncharacteristically short ‘Light Journal’ note where and when their various parts transpire - in this case, Greece, 1959. The journal format allows Wright to investigate or enumerate long passages of time and distance, as well as to pinpoint minutiae, such as ‘Chelsea Embankment, 5 p.m.’. His broken half-lines represent an intersection of Dickinson’s vertical apprehensions and Whitman’s horizontal comprehensions, allowing Wright heightened moments of musical intensity along a broader continuum of catalogued hours and sites. His inquisitive journals permit a disciplined self-analysis, often including a running conversation with the dead. In ‘A Journal of English Days’, which covers September to December 1983, Wright logs the birth and death dates of numerous past-masters - “Sunday, October 30th, Pound’s birthday ninety-eight years ago” - as if to remind himself of his own mortality. In Chickamauga (1995), his Jesuitical self-discernment is revealed immediately in titles like ‘Reading Rorty and Paul Celan One Morning in Early June’ and ‘After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard’. Wright’s preoccupation with placement, of which his reading material is an integral part, discloses a more pressing anxiety regarding displacement. His incremental record-keeping is a sort of examination of conscience, the goal being a self-actualization born of accountability.

     Despite his sprawling lines and journal-length poems, however, Wright’s intuition that nature contains the closest approximation to divinity makes him an intense listener. He seeks the cold zero of immediacy, in which he can hear the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is, while also describing the “dust of the world” in his sight:

We keep our eyes on the dirt.
Under the limp fins of the lemon tree, we inhabit our absence.
Crows cross-hatch and settle in,
                                                    red birds and dust sparrows
Spindle and dart through the undergrowth.
We don’t move. We watch, but we don’t move.

(‘Watching the Equinox Arrive in Charlottesville, September 1992’)

Unashamedly risking the pathetic fallacy throughout his work, Wright conceives poetry as both a conscious indulgence in the natural world (“We watch, but we don’t move”) and the equal and opposite drive to forego the here and now in favour of a postponed supernatural (“we inhabit our absence”). Considering the ephemerality of “what the hand breaks” both a salvation to be pursued and a temptation to be avoided, Wright embraces nature even as he submits it to becoming an occasion for moving beyond: the tension between “The other world is here, just under our fingertips” and “Everything we desire is somewhere else”. His homesickness usually results in the incessant search, pitched in phrasings of grief and anticipation, for “a moment’s peace/ From the knowledge that Paradise is what we live in/ And not a goal to yearn for”.

     Compelled by an emptiness at once prolonged and requited by what he observes, Wright is split between colloquy with a physical, temporal reality and progress towards a timeless invisible. He often counters that divided longing by intoning self-directives, like in ‘Sprung Narratives’:

Returned to the dwarf orchard,
                                                    Pilgrim,
Sit still and lengthen your lines,
Shorten your poems and listen to what the darkness says
With its mouthful of cold air.

With the vocative as his resource and recourse alike, Wright returns to the place that inspires his yearnings and attempts to master his unrest through his lines. Language, a partial step towards negating desire, also reveals itself as a locus of longing, and it is in this seasonal cycle of desire-requital-desire that Wright traces his vision-bound, visionary scenes.

     His contemplative need to stay in one place and his attendant urge to keep moving result in a poetry that engages - or re-engages - with the difficult and important spiritual issues of origin, journey and end. The thematics and compulsions of his work alone recommend him, and the strikingly conversational and contemporary manner in which he pursues them reaffirms his status as an American poet with universally applicable imperatives. Wright lives between an honest and unflinching appraisal of language’s inability to ameliorate desire and an equally courageous struggle to transform saying into being, as in this passage recalling Campana from the early sequence ‘Skins’ (Bloodlines, 1975):

And what does it come to, Pilgrim,
This walking to and fro on the earth, knowing
That nothing changes, or everything;
And only, to tell it, these sad marks,
Phrases left half-parsed, ellipses and scratches across the dirt?
It comes to a point. It comes and it goes.

It is in what Helen Vendler calls his “zones of dislocation...between the Christian and the biological, between Europe and America, and between the allegorical and the visible” that Wright situates a poetry lamenting the absence of situation. In positing that the temporary nature of existence in no way diminishes its significance, and in apologising for poetry’s position as spiritual odometer, Wright offers an exacting affirmation of doubt. He ought to be given a more accommodating home in this country.