SOURCE: A review of The Other Side of the River, in Washington Post Book World, May 20, 1984, p. 6.

In the following review, the critic offers praise for The Other Side of the River.

Charles Wright's stunning new book of poems [The Other Side of the River] is both a reckoning with a personal past and a meditation upon life's impermanence. Wright's poetry is always verbally electric, and his work here seems more charged and more exciting than ever.

For Wright, the currents of his past run between twin poles—the Tennessee of his childhood and the Italy of his young adulthood. It's to these places Wright returns in memory, to both reclaim and recover them, and the poems are often peopled with the characters who mattered then and, therefore, matter again now.

In a fine poem about his great-grandfather, “Arkansas Traveller,” he writes, “To speak of the dead is...