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Consolations and Regrets

ShallCross is C. D. Wright's first posthumous book (it may not be the last); it's also one of her best, and if you read it from cover to cover you will find most of the themes and approaches for which her poems are usually praised. It holds, for example, poems of informal, exuberant, sensual invitation, and poems that feel like quoted speech; many pages incorporate Southern speechways, defending their speakers, and their nonstandard English, as democratically authentic-these selves are good as any self. ShallCross also keeps up a complicated, mutually nourishing interaction with photography in general, and with the work of Wright's friend and collaborator, the photographer Deborah Luster, in particular. The book includes very long lists; very short lyric; fragments of stories without an entire story; and attention to the tough and sometimes self-destructive lives of other artists, as in the foldout catalog poem entitled "from The Obscure Lives of the Poets," or in the even more exciting, more diffuse, title poem, which incorporates (or simply is) a lament for the singer and songwriter Vic Chesnutt: "Now who will make the record of us / Who will be the author / Of our blind and bilious hours / Of the silken ear of our years" (140). So many parts of ShallCross do, clearly and proudly, what Wright's fans first seek in Wright's poetry, the qualities-thematic, emotional, tonal-that come up immediately when we introduce her body of work.And then there are the parts of ShallCross that appear to contain none of those things: the poems that are not exuberant, not obviously Southern, neither like photographs, nor like travelogues, nor yet like Whitman's democratic catalogues, nor yet like post-avant-garde fragments, nor even much like roots-rock, blues or bluegrass. And yet these poems sound like Wright, and demonstrate her powers, nonetheless. One of those poems is "Obscurity and Regret." It's a poem of dejection, of literally feeling crushed; it also recalls the broken-up, kaleidoscopic, but nonetheless sometimes sexy space of Wright's first book-length poem, Just Whistle (1992), in which "the body," along with other actors denominated by "the," had their say independent of proper nouns. Around "the thought" and "the body" here, though, Wright arranges the distress of an over-fertile, too-bright temperate summer, a counterpart to Wallace Stevens's disappointed autumn: "You like it under the trees in summer," Stevens wrote in "The Motive for Metaphor," "Because everything is half-dead. / The wind moves like a cripple under the leaves / And repeats words without meaning."When Wright sounds like Stevens it means that something has gone bleakly wrong. What is amiss for Wright, for the trees, for the poem? She has tried and failed to foil caterpillars; perhaps they are gypsy moths, a serious problem in southern New England, where Wright lived. She has also tried and failed to take back something said, as human beings might try and fail to take back industrial civilization, which spreads exotic species and other blights from climate to climate, tree to tree. Poets can decry such events, but not reverse them, especially not if they write poems as limited and self-enclosed as jars, like Stevens's jar in Tennessee (and perhaps all poems are so enclosed, though Wright's other work says it isn't so). This living hand, this screwed-up jar, jarringly enough, makes nothing happen: the exotic species, the infestation, the moths, are already loose, and the trees may be half-dead.Wright has written a brief poem about the impotence of poetry, the impotence of the creative temperament, to solve the problems that vex us, from climate change to discord between friends to one gauche remark, one green ichor stain, one death on the grass, like a serpent in Eden, like sin. She rewrote the Eden story throughout her career (see "Approximately Forever," for example) but usually she made it a fortunate fall; who wouldn't want to bear fruit, to inhabit the body fully, to enter into the contract by which "thought" and "body," "body" and "source," agree to change, to take risks in the visible world? …