Charles Wright's stunning new book, The Southern Cross …, is full of the familiar verbal iconographies and textural chromatics that have made his earlier books so distinctive and powerful. Wright's palpably physical sense of language—of language as sensual, supple material—invites us to see him in terms one usually reserves for the visual arts. Yet Wright's poems are clearly aware of and delighted by their own painterly and sculptural qualities; their architectures are simultaneously intellectual and spiritual…. Though Wright has always spoken of the profound influence Pound and Montale … have had upon his work, The Southern Cross—even its title—shows the enormously rich resource the poetry of Hart Crane has become for him. (pp. 230-31)

In many of the poems in The Southern Cross, Wright's concerns revolve around the idea of self-portraiture—not autobiography, with its implication of self-absorption and completeness, but self-portraiture. The distinction is important...