SOURCE: A review of The Southern Cross, in Washington Post Book World, June 27, 1982, p. 10.

In the following excerpt, Conarroe praises The Southern Cross as Wright's finest work to date.

Charles Wright was born several years after James Wright (no, they are not the Wright brothers), and although he has not acquired the fame of his namesake, he is slowly gaining a body of devoted readers and earning praise from demanding critics. The Southern Cross, his fifth book, will gain him new admirers. It is his strongest work to date.

Wright uses an untranslated passage (what faith!) from Dante's Purgatorio as his epigraph. I looked up the English version only after finishing the book, by then having decided that the passage must concern shadows and substance. It does, but I deserve no credit for prescience: Wright is preoccupied with ghosts and their demands. He tells the same story over...