SOURCE: “Raised Voices in the Choir: A Review of 1981 Poetry Selections,” in Antioch Review, Vol. 40, No. 2, Spring, 1982, pp. 225-34.

In the following excerpt, St. John offers a positive assessment of The Southern Cross.

In a yearly roundup of this sort, because of the limitations of space, it is difficult to discuss in even the most cursory way more than a handful of books. Still, there were a number of poetry books published in 1981 that deserve mention. …

Charles Wright's stunning new book, The Southern Cross, is full of the familiar verbal iconographies and textural chromatics that have made his earlier books so distinctive and powerful. Wright's palpably physical sense of language—of language as sensual, supple material—invites us to see him in terms one usually reserves for the visual arts. Yet Wright's poems are clearly aware of and delighted by their own painterly and sculptural qualities; their architectures...