[With The Southern Cross, Charles Wright creates] two new kinds of environment, civilization as manifest in gem-like labyrinths like Venice, and lush quasi-savage blossoming vegetation of the sort that flourishes in latitudes where the southern cross is prominent in the night sky. Furthermore, Wright could be said to depend absolutely on place, to work from it, in his crucial journeys, traced in so many poems, from rest to intense engagement with ethereal thresholds, tints of light, floating gestures—"an incandescent space," he says in one poem, "where nothing distinct exists, / And nothing ends, the days sliding like warm milk through the clouds." I quote these lines because they make explicit the poet's preference for the hazy, the milky, the upper-atmospheric; these are the trappings of his transcendent states of infancy.

I use the term "infancy" advisedly. Charles Wright's apotheoses are characteristically visions of a presexual, light-suffused mist, the...