Volume 55, Number 3 · March 6, 2008
Snatched from the Air
By Helen Vendler
Littlefoot: A Poem
by Charles Wright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 91 pp., $23.00
The fundamental problem addressed by Charles Wright's poetry is the invisibility of my inner world to you, yours to me. Unless your perceptions and responses are gathered and set down with their nuances intact, I have no way of knowing what today genuinely looks like and feels like to you. Naturalists—Kilvert, Thoreau—have kept famous diaries of their observations and reactions. But for the poet, there is an added requirement that goes beyond perceiving and responding: he must put a sheen on the day that must seem to come from inside the day itself—as though the clouds had something to express, the leaves felt an obscure desire, the sun had a purpose for its rays. Wright is not the first poet to attempt to make the natural world appear to speak and feel for itself in his lines: he acknowledges debts in this respect to Dante, Dickinson, Hopkins, Pound, Stevens.
Review, 3159 words
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