Charles Wright’s Oblivion Banjo – published in advance of his 85th birthday (Farrar, Straus, £20) – is somewhere between a Collected and Selected and begins with a homage to Ezra Pound:
Today is one of those daysOne swears is a prophecy:The air explicit and moist,As though filled with unanswered prayers
This sounds like the day everything started for Wright. After...
Finishing Oblivion Banjo, I was left in a Wright-like quandary: ‘I seem to have come to the end of something, but don’t know what.’ The book offers itself as ‘the perfect distillation’ of his life’s work, but this is a little counterintuitive, partly because the poems have the air of unfinished business, and partly because the later volumes are less powerful than the earlier ones: Wright sometimes appears to be leaning on the gnomic rather than thinking with it.