Wright is … a thoroughly professional poet, and he writes the off-real journal entry, the shadowy song of rural experience, which is the characteristic magazine poem of our time. His technique, the over-all look and feel of his poems, come from Pound: the lines always hang nicely, and do their wire-walk quietly, without appearing to show off. The local texture, however, is echt-1970s. Here are middle-period Justice ("I open the phone book, and look for my adolescence. / How easy the past is—"), and Merwin ("The banked candles the color of fresh bone, / Smoke rising from the chimneys beyond the beyond, / Nightfires, your next address …"—which sounds New Yorker-ish, and when you look it up, it is), and James Wright's hammock poem ("Green apples, a stained quilt, / The black clock of the heavens reset in the future tense. / Salvation's a simple thing"). Charles Wright would be more...