SOURCE: “Writers & Writing: Through Memory and Miniatures,” in New Leader, August 20, 1984, pp. 17-18.

In the following review, Pettingell offers a positive assessment of The Other Side of the River.

The title poem of Charles Wright's latest collection, The Other Side of the River, flows easily from memories of hunting along the banks of the Savannah where it divides South Carolina and Georgia to other Southern boyhood recollections:

It's linkage I'm talking about,                                         and harmonies and structures And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past. 

But these reminiscences are similes for the present as well. Wright mentions, for instance, that at 15 he climbed a mountain, with five days' supplies on a pack horse, to repair a fire tower. After dark, from his camp, he could see the lights of a town by a lake, 3,000 feet below. Now he muses,

These nights are like that, The...