Charles Wright called his seventh collection Zone Journals to emphasize how the poems draw on time and place as their starting point. But despite the air of immediacy and informality, they are artfully composed, informed as always by Wright's profound sense of subliminal order.
"Called one of our best middle-generation poets, Wright offers as his seventh collection a series of meditations emphasizing time and place. He draws upon history (especially Renaissance Italy), his own travels, and nature (especially rivers, as "There's something about a river/ No ocean can answer to"); he savors anniversaries (noting on a given day that Cezanne died 77 years ago)...But always perceptible is the poet's fascination with the disappearance of the present into the past." - Library Journal