The Southern Cross is surely Charles Wright's best book, the one he has been preparing for through all his earlier volumes. Like Bin Ramke and Robert Penn Warren, Wright is a Southerner, a fact which has a profound relevance to the texture of his verse. His poems throb with stylistic richness, most palpably in a lushness of image and word; one needs a delicate touch indeed to feel the subtle modulations of theme that lie just beneath this surface. (p. 188)

[The] spiritual setting of this entire volume has much in common with the Purgatorio of Dante, from which Wright has chosen a comprehensive epigraph: the concluding seven lines of Canto XXI…. Wright in this book is always aware of and searching for evidence of the spiritual within the real, always aware of the possibility of angels.

Time is the most serious and pervasive theme in The Southern Cross...