Charles Wright's China Trace … is a book of apparently slight but actually firm and brilliant metaphysical lyrics…. I have not read this poet before and have missed therefore an admirable writer, whose diction is always precise and illuminating and who sustains his own poetics: I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear / Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace. (p. 26)

Harold Bloom, in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1977 by The New Republic, Inc.), November 26, 1977.