Charles Wright's books seem to be coming fast now, perhaps too fast: in 1973 Hard Freight and here, early in 1975, Bloodlines. I think it has to be said that Bloodlines is not quite so sustained a performance as Hard Freight was …, and perhaps the reader new to Wright should begin with that earlier elegy upon and qualified celebration of "The infinite rectitude / Of all that is past," that series of forward journeys backward "always into the earth." In Bloodlines, to be sure, much is much the same, as in the phrase "the clouds, those mansions of nothingness," which so clearly remembers "The clouds, great piles of oblivion." And I seem to recall from both The Grave of the Right Hand (his first book) and Hard Freight the largely mystifying private iconography of shoes, gloves, hats and hands that one encounters here. Indeed, not only in particular but in general...