SOURCE: "Guided by Dark Stars," in New York Times, August 31, 1997.

[In the following review Muske praises Black Zodiac, and excerpts several of Wright's poems.]

Autobiography is what Charles Wright has been writing—in poetic form—for over 30 years. It has been an uncommon kind of life accounting, and his new book, Black Zodiac, extends his oblique definition. For a life story, in Wright's terms, exists as much in what is not there as in what is. In Black Zodiac, as the title hints, Wright ruminates on the "dark stars" that guide our fates and provide the contrast that shapes us: the shadow, the photograph's negative, the mirror's reversals. He tracks the unspoken but heard, the unseen but sensed—the system of "signs" (including language itself) that creates us as surely as we believe we create it.

His emphasis on non-emphasis highlights a sharp division of perspective in contemporary...