SOURCE: “Life as a Poetic Puzzlement,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 19, 1984, p. 7.

In the following review, Eshleman offers an unfavorable assessment of The Other Side of the River.

For the most part, the writing in Charles Wright's new book [The Other Side of the River] is languorous, nostalgic and flecked with puzzlements about the meaning of life. At best, he has a Whitmanian eye for landscape and botanical detail, and renders the names of the places and things that have touched him in the past.

However, the modest talent for “naming” is permeated with generalized commentary that rises like bubbles and disappears:

What is it about a known landscape                     that tends to undo us, That shuffles and picks us out For terminal demarcation, the way a field of lupine Seen in profusion deep in the timber Suddenly seems to rise like a lavender ground fog At...