Music's Mask and Measure

Praised to the skies by Harold Bloom and given a MacArthur “genius” award and a Bollingen Prize, Wright has never been easy to dismiss nor easy to follow. His book-length sequences and prophetic utterances draw on almost all fields of human endeavor, from West African musical traditions to Newtonian and quantum physics, yielding work of almost unsurpassed ambition and density. This terse series of short free verse stanzas, split into five shorter sequences called “equations,” marks a re-emergence of sorts, being (along with two more volumes announced for 2007) the poet's first book since his 2000 new-and-collected, Transfigurations . Admirers will enjoy the heady compression, the polyrhythms created by Wright's religious ambitions, on the one hand, and his scientific learning, on the other: “Who would go into the river/ to recover a seed, or sit/ with a blacksmith and bard in high/ lament?” asks the first equation. “Bound by a complexity/ of wave, the river/ becomes a consonant/ intrusion, the singular/ flow of a constant point,” explains the fourth. Unlikely to win broad applause, Wright's new work could win over a few more readers: thoughtful ones, not polymaths, perhaps, but fellow poets, who hear in his complexities a welcome challenge. (July)