SOURCE: “A Hand, a Hook, a Prayer,” in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 26, No. 5, September-October, 1997, pp. 17-20

In the following excerpt, Hirsch analyzes Wright's handling of encounters between needy strangers in several of his poems.

James Wright's poem “Hook” explores a moment of direct contact, of actual—of actualizing—connection. It gestures toward the reader by recalling, by summoning up out of the distant past, a fleeting but necessary encounter with another person, a stranger. It was written with that deceptively blunt and aggressive directness that characterized so much of Wright's late work. Wright once wrote an essay called “The Delicacy of Walt Whitman” and I find a similar delicacy—an unlikely almost Horatian lightness—in much of his own seemingly raw work. Here is “Hook”:

I was only a young man In those days. On that evening The cold was so God damned Bitter there was nothing...