I have been worrying the bone of this essay for days because, in an issue of Ironwood honoring James Wright, I want to say some things against his poems. The first of his books that I read was The Branch Will Not Break. It is supposed to have broken ground by translating the imagery of surrealist and expressionist poetics into American verse. That was not what I responded to. What mattered to me in those poems was that their lean, clear, plain language had the absolute freshness of sensibility. They made sensibility into something as lucid and alert as intelligence…. I can give you an example from Shall We Gather at the River:

       Along the sprawled body of the derailed
       Great Northern freight car,
       I strike a match slowly and lift it slowly.
       No wind.
 
       Beyond town, three heavy white horses
       Wade all the way to their shoulders...