The Southern Cross

by Charles Wright

Poems deal with mortality, the past, poetry, art, and the importance of place

Genres: Poetry

65 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Charles Wright is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac.

From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. Charles Wright is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. He attended Davidson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he also served four years in the U.S. Army, and it was while stationed in Italy that Wright began to read and write poetry. He is the author of over 20 books of poetry.

Charles Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”

Reviews

[Michael Gossett · Rating 5 out of 5]

That first long poem--oh my God. The weight of death looms large in the South, and Charles Wright has a good feel for rendering it lyrically.

[Patrick Mcgee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Wright rocks the house! That is all. Highly Recommended.

[Aaron Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

i learned of this collection by way of an oral history of david berman at the university of virginia, found here: https://news.virginia.edu/content/por...

he attended uva and had wright as an instructor. the oral history contains a letter berman had written to wright about how he read “the southern cross” in the backseat of a rental car in the delta in january and was deeply moved.

i tracked down a copy on the internet and have been reading it since new year’s day. the poems are beautiful and i enjoyed the book quite a bit. i liked looking up the plants he writes about, as well as the places in italy. he mentions pepper trees a lot. go look up a pepper tree, if you aren’t familiar. they are beautiful.

here is a poem called “Self Portrait” that i liked:

In Murray, Kentucky I lay once
On my side, the ghost-weight of a past life in my arms,
A life not mine. I know she was there,
Asking for nothing, heavy as bad luck, still waiting to rise.
I know now and I lift her.

Evening becomes us.
I see myself in a tight dissolve, and answer to no one.
Self-traitor, I smuggle in
The spider love, undoer and rearranger of all things.
Angel of Mercy, strip me down.

This world is a little place,
Just red in the sky before the sun rises.
Hold hands, hold hands
That when the birds start, none of us is missing.
Hold hands, hold hands.

—

i just wanted to close this review by saying that i’m writing it on a saturday morning having just finished the book. i’m still in bed, and my cat is leaned up against my side, washing her eyebrows with one paw. the humidifier is nearby, pumping mist. light’s coming in through a yellow curtain. in a couple minutes i’m going to walk up the street for a cup of coffee.

the poem the book is named after is about memory. in it, wright is trying to remember all of these details of the time he spent in italy. how the water sounded. how the light fell on certain things. he remembers quite a bit, but there are things he can’t remember. the past always looks better than the present. in part of the poem he’s sitting on his porch, watching a spider.

ok, now go do something like that today. you might want to remember some of this later.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

So here's another book I owned for 40 years or more before I finally read it carefully. Back them I thought of Charles Wright as a dominant presence in contemporary poetry (and this book won a Pulitzer 43 years ago). His poems were in all the magazines (which I still read assiduously then), and I thought I understood him. Poet of the South, of a domesticated back yard nature, of a certain complexity of diction. Maybe I had some sense of the scope of literary reference. But I hadn't been moved by his work. He had taught a friend of mine who adored him (Tom Andrews, gone far too young), and that friend had appeared in some of Wright's poems (after this book). I knew he had lived in Italy and had translated from Italian.

But it never occurred to me that he could be working under the influence of Ezra Pound, who I have often thought never really influenced any other writer since, oh, 1930. But I'm hearing the best of Pound in these poems-- I don't know if it's intentional or not. In the references, in the Italian landscape, in the concerns for Art. And here's a poem which I'm guessing actually has Pound in it. "Landscape with Seated Figure and Olive Tree":

Orange blossoms have dropped their threads
On the stone floor of the heart
more often than once
Between last night's stars and last night's stars.
And the Preludes have left their rings
On the chalk white of the walls.
And the slide-harp has played and played.

And now, under the fruit trees,
the lives silver then not silver, the wind
In them then not, the old man
Sits in the sunfall,
Slouched and at ease in the sunfall, the leaves tipped in the wind.

The world is nothing to him.
And the music is nothing to him, and the noon sun.
Only the wind matters.
Only the wind as it moves through the tin shine of the leaves.
And the orange blossoms,
scattered like poems on the smooth stones.

I find that a very moving homage.

[Naomi Ayala · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got more than 20 pages in before I found a poem I really liked, "Self-Portrait." And, like most of the portraits in the book, it's among my favorites. The title poem itself not so much.

*Self-Portrait*

In Murray, Kentucky I lay once
On my side, the ghost-weight of a past life in my arms,
A life not mine. I know she was there,
Asking for nothing, heavy as bad luck, still waiting to rise.
I know now and I lift her.

Evening becomes us.
I see myself in a tight dissolve, and answer to no one.
Self-traitor, I smuggle in
The spider love, undoer and rearranger of all things.
Angel of Mercy, strip me down.

This world is a little place,
Just red in the sky before the sun rises.
Hold hands, hold hands
That when the birds start, none of us is missing.
Hold hands, hold hands.

[ExeDavid · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars