by Charles Wright
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by Jason Bredle
We’re All Going to Die
Comprised entirely of six-line poems yet continuing his aesthetic of long lines seated in the rural, Sestets takes the best qualities of Charles Wright’s work, compacts them and delivers them in smaller, more powerful doses. Whereas I oftentimes get completely lost in the description of Wright’s earlier work and lose sight of what his poems are even about, here, because of the length constraint, his descriptive powers are tighter than ever and on full display, giving way to lyrical, compelling meditations on nature and impermanence that unfold like the landscape he so often returns to.
In “Homage to What’s-His-Name,” Wright writes:
Ah, description, of all the arts least appreciated.
Well, it’s just this and it’s just that,
someone will point out.
Exactly. It’s just this and it’s just that and nothing other.From landscape to unsuppressed conjunction, it’s only itself.
No missteps, no misreading.
And what’s more metaphysical than that,
The world in its proper posture, on all fours, drinking the sweet water?
Description is just description, but here Wright shows us its power – not in the form of describing something, but moreso in the form of explaining exactly why it’s powerful. Like a landscape, it is what it is, and like a landscape, it can lead one to a spiritual revelation of sorts. For Wright, one rooted soundly in nature:
We live on Orphan Mountain,
each of us, and that’s how it is,
Kingfisher still wet
And chattering on his empty branch.Water remains immortal—
Poems can’t defile it,
The heron, immobile on one leg,
Stands in it, snipe stitch it, and heaven pillows its breast.
Certain aspects of a landscape – water, mountains – will, for the most part, remain here forever. Those of us who trod the landscape, however, can exist upon it, but will go away soon enough. Here, not only does Wright address the coming and going of the world, but also our loneliness – “We live on Orphan Mountain” – no matter how many things we may surround ourselves with, we’re ultimately alone.
Death is the mother of nothing.
This is a fact of life,
And exponentially sad.
All these years – a lifetime, really – thinking it might be otherwise.What are the colors of despair?
Are they calibrated, like vowels?
How will we know them?
Who knows where the light will fall
As the clouds go from west to the east?
It seems macabre to think of Wright’s own age and its relationship with the subject matter of the poems from this book – particularly mortality – but like Merwin’s In the Shadow of Sirius, I find myself drawn to the wisdom of age and what’s truly important in the world when the day winds down. Here, the speaker confesses a lifetime thinking a release from the inevitable might exist, but ultimately gives up and questions what the reality truly is. In the end, is there really an answer?
Seventy years, and what’s left?
Or better still, what’s gone before?
A couple of lines, a day or two out in the cold?
And all those books, those half-baked books,
Sweet yeast for the yellow dust.What say, Orazio? Like you, I’m sane and live at the edge of things,
Countryside flooded with light,
Sundown,
The chaos of future mornings just over the ridge, but not here yet.
Here Wright continues his meditation on death and nature. It’s a harsh reality – what does one really have and what will one really leave behind of importance when death finally arrives? This poem also evokes the sense of doom or dread just beyond the horizon in much of the book. We know death is coming, but we will never know when. Still, this doesn’t mean all is bleak.
In “Future Tense,” Wright writes
All things in the end are bittersweet—
An empty gaze, a little way station just beyond silence.If you can’t delight in the everyday,
You have no future here.And if you can, no future either.
And time, black dog, will sniff you out,
and lick your lean cheeks,
And lie down beside you—warm, real close—and will not move.
Just because we’re all going to die doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy what we have. In poem after poem in Sestets, Wright uses his familiar Appalachian landscape to expound upon nature and our mortality and the mortality inherent in nature. I couldn’t recommend this book enough to everyone. It feels like the truth, like a deathbed repentance, and like a tranquil meditation in the forest. It feels like not only an elegy for the self, but an elegy for the world. These poems are wise beyond imagination. They’re like a hymnal dug from the ground and handed to us all to help us deal with the inevitable.
*
Charles Wright is certainly prolific and while many might expect him to recede into redundancy his latest, Scar Tissue, is a testament to his unwillingness and inability to do so. The natural successor to 2004’s Buffalo Yoga (which was the natural successor to A Short History of the Shadow, which was the natural successor to Appalachia, and so on down the line to Black Zodiac), Scar Tissue is yet another gratifying chapter from Wright, whose every collection seems to add an impressive and necessary facet to his life’s work. Scar Tissue—portions of which were collected in a chapbook last year unfortunately titled The Wrong End of the Rainbow—does just that, with a bit less command than the aforementioned collections.