SOURCE: “The Nothing That Is,” in New Republic, August 7, 1995, pp. 42-5.

In the following review, Vendler offers a positive evaluation of Chickamauga. Vendler contends that Wright's “eschatological” poems are rich with striking imagery and lyric meditations on life, death, and poetic representation.

The title poem of Charles Wright's new book [Chickamauga] doesn't mention the Civil War battle of Chickamauga or the soldiers who died in it, and in this it is typical of Wright's practice. The poem climbs to a vantage point where the anonymity of history has blanked out the details. What is left is the distillate: that something happened at this place, that its legacy of uneasiness inhabits the collective psyche (Wright was born in Tennessee), that it will not let us go and demands a response. A confessional poet might write about his own family's legacy from the war. A socially minded poet might recount...