[James Wright] was a poet of enormous verbal resources and skills engaged in a complex and deeply human quest to write—in his own terms—"the poetry of a grown man" in the style of "the pure clear word." He was one of our great poets of the lost and desolate, feeling his way emotionally into the lives of the cheated, the drunk, the lunatic. He was also a Horatian craftsman for whom craftsmanship was never itself enough, continually struggling for clarity and against glibness in his work, and somehow capable of revealing what Robert Hass calls "the aboriginal loneliness of being." But if Wright was an explorer of our specifically human social darkness, he was also a poet of lyric ecstasy and radiant natural light. Over the years his work increasingly evoked the external natural world. Now in his last, posthumous collection—virtually completed before his death...