The insistence on the radiant image and line, a line that traces the sacred dimension of the natural world and offers a space of contemplation, is a central and defining quality of the poetry of Charles Wright. More than most poets of his generation, he has written poetry that has increasingly explored the overlay of sensual and sacred beauty. Although he generally eschews narrative and expository elements in his work, most of his poems have an autobiographical grounding; in fact, the poems almost always emerge from specific images of particular places, whether they be Tennessee, Italy, or California. Rigorously constructed, Wright's poems emphasize the possibilities of associative connections between images. In counterbalance to this visual element, Wright's lines stress musicality and the richness of shifting rhythms. In describing the objective of poetry, Wright essentially defines himself: in his Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews 1977-87 (1988), he states that "the ultimate...