The sun has set behind the Blue Ridge, And evening with its blotting paper lifts off the light.Shadowy yards. Moon through the white pines--"Landscape with Missing Overtones"Never has Charles Wright`s vision been more closely aligned with the work of the ancient Chinese painters and writers who inform his poetry than in his newest collection. Wright`s short lyrics, in Charles Simic`s words, "achieve a level of eloquence where the reader says to himself, if this is not wisdom, I don`t know what is" (The New York Review of Books). The poems in Buffalo Yoga are pristine examples of the Tennessee poet`s deft, painterly touch--"crows in a caterwaul" are "scored like black notes in the bare oak"--and his oblique, expansive, and profound interrogation of mortality, as in the title sequence, where the soul is "a rhythmical knot. / That form unties. Or reties."
