SOURCE: “Wanted: More Complexity,” in Southern Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, Winter, 1997, pp. 136-49.

In the following excerpt, Bedient commends Wright's skeptical meditations in Chickamauga, but notes that Wright's treatment of the subject of language is not wholly successful.

Complexity, meaning integration achieved against multiple currents, against odds, is indispensable to major poetic accomplishment. The exquisitely simple lyric—say, “O wild West Wind”—is rare; and given its extreme brevity, “O wild West Wind,” at least, is not so very simple. It is undeniably a great lyric. But major? Major implies the inner bonding of much complexity, even if the result is—as increasingly it has been required to be—half open. …

Charles Wright's Chickamauga returns us to the anguish (which is not to say the achievement) of “transubstantiated moments.” Chickamauga, “site of a Civil War battle on the border of the poet's native Tennessee,” as the dust jacket instructs...