These reviews first appeared in 1993 in "Milvia Street", a literary magazine published by the community college in Berkeley, California.

Born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, C.D. Wright has published seven collections of poetry most recently, String Light (University of Georgia Press, 1991) and JUST WHISTLE a valentine (Kelsey Street Press, Berkeley, July 1993 through Small Press Distribution).

C.D. Wright's poems and articles have appeared in Five Fingers Review, Ironwood, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Sulfur, Tri-Quarterly and other magazines. Among numerous literary honors, she has received The Lila Wallace Writer's Award and the Whiting Writers' Award. In 1981 Wright received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a second was awarded in 1988. She was also awarded the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters in 1986 and in 1987 Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Bunting Institute. With poet Forest Gander she presently edits Lost Roads Publishers, a book press.

In String Light, Wright's ability to render and name things with detail creates a complete, complex world, as if one is peering into an anthole and watching the strange daily activities of an insect from the Ozarks and seeing oneself so clearly in the moves of this insect. Indeed, she renders a light by being so close to the "inanimate darkness" just around the corner of every tree. She understands, as does the grandmother in More Blues and the Abstract Truth , how the body breaks bread "with the word when the word has broken. Again. And. Again. With the wine. And the loaf. And the excellent glass of the body". For, "Even. IF. The. Sky. Is. Falling. / My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom." Here is a simple and unpretencious rendering -- a real world of spit and love and mechanics and paper boys, and an equally clear internal rendering:

Where you thought you would come upon
blades of steel light or where
you thought the doves would collect themselves
there is only enough soil enough blood
and seed good enough for one tree." (Utopia)

The large infiltration of the human in the peculiar forms in which you find it lends anyone's life and memory and daily observations to the poet's field.

Walking throught Codornices Park in Berkeley, California today I was contemplating the irregular dirty world around and within the park pipes carelessly laid over the creek, digging through its banks, supporting the branch of a flowering almond tree. A turquoise front-zip sweatshirt left on the path what must have been a week ago, now opened, face down and muddy, a splayed shadow on the pavement. Strewn carelessly about are many such peculiar things, and many particular shadows falling between bodies, and objects or people who need to be named and renamed and renamed again in the same manner in which each of us takes a separate breath, learns to drive, learns to use a cane.

Time in motion. The particular quality of the thing will not last -- the way he smiles, the way you undress. For Wright and for many of us it/he/she/ you most likely deserve to be mentioned somewhere. Perhaps an ode?

JUST WHISTLE a valentine is a more difficult text, simultaneously filled with gritty vocabulary and language centered in/from the body, one that involves particular new forms, language processes, elevated and fragmented language. Initially, it was harder for me to begin the piece, but once I was hooked, it was harder for me to put down. Perhaps it was the book's innate/primal sexuality and aesthetics, two definitive transcendental experiences, that pulled me in.

Some pages and fragments I kept going back to instinctually, trying to decide why. C.D. Wright often depicts a mythic sense of the everyday in elliptical forms with lists of phrases in floating paragraphs.

On one page you read:

in the body's own words, it cannot live like a vegetable in the country, it no longer cares if it does die do, let them take a crowbar to its valves, let them open the howl of its os on the rocks, why don't you go put your hands in some water, the body is urged, but it chooses to celebrate its firing with a smoke

and then on the following page this digressive language continues as it does in a throughout the book:

its careless posture, its long trunk, its howling os, for so long it has been accused of bruxism, of failure to perform on the pot, of fulgurating, of priapism, of bags; there are things which happen to it only at night, but the body dare not repeat them, the better to disguise its beastliness, while its ferns continue to brush their fronds off the porch, the cat cries and cries to be let out, then cries and cries to be let in, the body has been prepped, no need to shave everything, what doesn't take too long is over too fast, the body is possessed of childlike fears, predominantly flat fears, the armadillo does not respond to its calls, a phone rings and rings, the book opens, the letters take off black as flies, it fulgurates, love avec disgust, time divided by mercy, who is its shepard, crow minus love, has it any wool, what on earth could be keeping it

I read this and many other pages as a kind of despair of the body, despair of the inability of instinct or the human animal to speak, to express itself through language.

At times JUST WHISTLE celebrates this duality -- beastliness verses an educated and transcendent consciousness, accompanied by a regression of voice or pre-literacy. The flow of perception, of myth, of language originates where most knowledge is seated: in the body or in everyday experience, from repeated close proximity to particular objects (for Wright these include panties, the pot, the porch, cats...), in heightened moments of experience (the body in childbirth, in sex), and after regression to ones' gut level. An intestinal language arises from this regression and hence, is characteristic of the sphere where Wright circles, where she decends.

Another element which contributes to this work of pre-literacy is the sense of separation of body and soul. In many parts of JUST WHISTLE, it seems as if one could interprate the speaker as either the soul (conscious self) talking about her body or the body talking about IT, the self-conscious self/the transcedent one. This duality both contributes to and confuses the sound of pre-literacy. Isn't the conscious self supposed to be in charge of language, in control, unconfused? Who/what is the "IT" in much of the piece? Or the "you". Perhaps "in the body's own words, it cannot live like a vegetable in the country..." But then later in the book, a voice is talking to the body, "I just want you to last, when already the unlasting has started, ruts have formed..."

Perhaps the entire piece is merely an "ineluctable concussion", an inevitable collision of a body with world, of a body trying to speak, of a soul trying to speak through the body.