SOURCE: "Between Soil and Stars," in Nation, April 14, 1997, pp. 27-30.

[Longenbach teaches at the University of Rochester. In the following review, he praises Black Zodiac and compares the collection to Wright's overall body of work.]

Almost thirty years ago, Charles Wright began a poetic project of astonishing scope. A trilogy of books, later winnowed and collected in Country Music (1982), offers a highly compressed autobiography, tracing Wright's spiritual journey from the soil to the stars. In the next three books, gathered with a coda in The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990), Wright adopts more wayward structures, his long lines reaching in countless directions at once. Read in its entirety. The World of the Ten Thousand Things seems to me one of the great American long poems—a lovingly detailed survey of our world that is also a visionary map of the world beyond. "Out of our own mouths...