SOURCE: A review of Black Zodiac, in America, Vol. 177, No. 20, December 20-27, 1997, p. 24.

[In the following review Hosmer comments on Black Zodiac, comparing the development of themes in this collection to Wright's earlier poetry.]

Charles Wright's 11th book of poetry, Black Zodiac, is an intriguing, occasionally very difficult, but immensely rewarding collection of 20 poems. The first poem, "Apologia pro Vita Sua," is an overture introducing major concerns (death, faith, identity, language and art), directing attention to basic elements of the natural world and its rhythms (earth, air, light) and establishing the dominant "interrogative-metaphysical" mood of the collection. Wright's narrator, a somewhat more personal version of what Helen Vendler has called "the transcendent I," poses two important questions: "Who among us will step forward?" and "Who can distinguish darkness from the dark, light from the light, subject matter from story line, the part from the whole, when the whole...