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Pursuing the effect of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “He heightens worth who guardedly diminishes,” Charles Wright’s early lyrics are taut, controlled, and highly compressed. Although their diction is neither unnatural nor stilted, the poems are...

Landscape was never a subject matter, it was a technique, 
A method of measure, 
                                a scaffold for structuring. 
I stole its silences, I stepped to its hue and cry. 

As the Rialto burned
I stood across the street
in front of the dry goods store

Have you noticed the horses galloping past us?
Perhaps they are horses with no riders at all.
Perhaps they are riders who have turned into horses.

I can’t imagine breaking up with you.
Instead, I think about the neighbors’ problems:
His anguished look seems punishment for truth;
his “other half” is thin and Puerto Rican.