SOURCE: “Open Secrets,” in Parnassus, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1978, pp. 125-42.

In the following essay, Yenser reviews two collections by Wright, and explores the tension between order and adventure in his poetry.

At least since The Branch Will Not Break (1963) James Wright's poetry has been pulled in two directions—or in one uncertain direction by two sometimes opposing forces. We might as well make them horses, especially since, as he reaffirms in Moments of the Italian Summer, Wright considers horses perhaps “the most beautiful of God's creatures.” One of them we could call David, after Robert Bly's sway-backed palomino who has appeared in several of Wright's poems. He is the older, the more reliable, the more steadily paced of the two—the likelier wheelhorse. He wants to keep the vehicle, if not in the ruts, at least on the road and headed toward home. On the other side there...