"Country Music" (poems originally published between 1970 and 1977) is … [a] substantial selection from a poet in his middle 40's. The title, though it playfully alludes to the music of the American South, where [Wright] was born and brought up, more accurately refers to the silent "music" of the landscape. (p. 14)

Mr. Wright's Tennessee boyhood provides the subject matter of many of these poems, but … he is no literalist. Rejecting plot and naturalistic detail, he would draw our attention, in his finely crafted poems, to subtler essences. (pp. 14, 31)

In contrast to many of his contemporaries who might say, with Jim Harrison, "In our poetry we want to rub our nose hard / into whatever is before it," Mr. Wright has a distinctly different purpose: "I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear / Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace." To avoid the problem of literal...