Critical Excerpts On

"Homage To Cezanne" Essay, Research Paper

Edward Hirsch

The Southern Cross is a complex gesture to the past bracketed by two complementary

long poems, "Homage to Paul C.zanne," a hypnotic, highly figurative litany for

the unnamed dead, and the title piece. . . .

"Homage to Paul C.zanne" is an attempt to amplify voices that have become

too faint to hear. In eight unnumbered sections, each sixteen lines long and given a

separate page, the poem postulates a wide range of things the dead do, refusing to

individuate them. "At night, in the fish-light of the moon, the dead wear our white

shirts / To stay warm, and litter the fields," it begins. "We pick them up in

the mornings, dewy pieces of paper and scraps of cloth." In the elusive and

cumulative imagery of this poem, the dead are always with us, an ancestral

presence–refracted and transfigured, moving and unsettled, fading and returning, evasive,

unrecoznizable, nudging "close to the surface of all things." They slip under

our feet and twist like stars over our heads. They are mist on the mirror, a gap in the

wind, a space we enter in dreams, what we will become. Until then, however, "We sit

out on the earth and stretch our limbs, / Hoarding the little mounds of sorrow laid up in

our hearts."

Wright’s "Homage" is a nonlinear poem in an oracular mode, an attempt to

bring a series of painterly techniques to the poetic sequence. C.zanne is the magnetizing

presence and guiding example, especially the sixty paintings of Mont Sante-Victoire that

he made between 1882 and 1906. Wright’s idea is to treat words like pigment, to build the

blocks, by layering lines and stanzas the way C.zanne used color and form. The fourth

section recalls C.zanne’s commitment to significant form, his determination to seek in

nature the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, to penetrate its masses and planes, to use

the color blue as a way of defining space, an intercession between earth and heaven:

The dead are a cadmium blue.

We spread them with palette knives in broad blocks and planes.

We layer them stroke by stroke

In steps and ascending mass, in verticals raised from the earth.

We choose, and layer them in,

Blue and a blue and a breath,

Circle and smudge, cross-beak and buttonhook,

We layer them in. We squint hard and terrace them line by line.

For C.zanne technique was itself spiritual ("What we are given in dreams we write

as blue paint") and there is an exaltation to his work that is sometimes linked to

the pantheism of Chinese painting. That’s one reason he becomes "The Black

Chateau"–the title of one of his greatest paintings–at the end of Wright’s fourth

self-portrait.

From The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini. Copyright . 1993

by Columbia University Press.

Helen Vendler

Throughout the volume Wright persistently imagines himself dead, dispersed,

re-elemented into the natural order. ("And I am not talking about reincarnation at

all. At all. At all.") In focusing on earth, in saying that "salvation doesn’t

exist except through the natural world," Wright approaches C.zanne’s reverence for

natural forms, geometrical and substantial ones alike. China Trace is meant to have

"a journal-like, everyday quality," but its aphorisms resemble pens.es more

than diary jottings, just as its painters and poets (Morandi, Munch, Trakl, Nerval)

represent the arrested, the composed, the final, rather than the provisional, the blurred,

or the impressionistic. China Trace is in fact one long poem working its desolation

by accretion; it suffers in excerpts. Its mourning echoes need to be heard like the

complaint of doves–endless, reiterative, familiar, a twilight sound:

There is no light for us at the end of the light.

No one redeems the grass our shadows lie on.

Each night, in its handful of sleep, the mimosa blooms.

Each night the future forgives.

inside us, albino roots are starting to take hold.

. . .

If China Trace can be criticized for an unrelenting elegiac fixity, nonetheless

its consistency gives it incremental power. its deliberateness, its care in motion, its

slow placing of stone on stone, dictate our reading it as construction rather than as

speech. It is not surprising that as a model Wright has chosen C.zanne, that most

architectural of painters. . . .

Wright’s eight-poem sequence "Homage to C.zanne" builds up, line by line, a

sense of the omnipresent dead. Wright’s unit here is the line rather than the stanza, and

the resulting poem sounds rather like the antiphonal chanting of psalms: one can imagine

faint opposing choruses singing the melismatic lines:

The dead fall around us like rain.

They come down from the last clouds in the late lig

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