A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright ed. by Anne Wright, Saundra Rose Maley, and Jonathan Blunk (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS REVIEWS Anne Wright, Saundra Rose Maley, and Jonathan Blunk, eds. A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005. Hardcover, $40.00 "Even if a fellow. . .spends his life in a coal mine, this does not mean that his sons and daughters must do the same." —James Wright in a letter to Jack Furniss, 1950 Although James Arlington Wright left his hometown of Martin's Ferry, Ohio for good upon graduating from high school in 1946, the northern Appalachian region that imprinted itself upon his youthful imagination remained a central concern in his work until his untimely death from cancer ofthe tongue in 1980. While such well-known poems as "At the Executed Murderer's Grave," "Autumn Begins in Martin's Ferry, Ohio," and "In Response to a Rumor that the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned" employ explicit Appalachian settings and themes—from the failed dreams of steel workers and hoboes to the ill effects of industrialization on the natural environment—a significant number of Wright's other poems employ his troubled ambivalence toward the region as implicit subtext, even when they seem to have little or nothing to do withAppalachia directly. A good example is "Saint Judas," the title poem from his second book of verse, where Wright parallels his own traitorous reasons for leaving the confines of urban Appalachia with the experiences of Christ's betrayer, Judas, whose selfishness is used for ultimate good to fulfill God's plan of redemption, an idea Wright uses metapoetically to justify his negative depictions of Appalachia that accumulate in the beautiful formalist poetry that fills the volume. These uneasy feelings toward the region continually crop up in the poet's thirty-four years of correspondence published in A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright. Throughout, the poet undercuts his nostalgic attraction to home with his contempt for Appalachia's cultural inertia. While such concerns rarely become the main focus of any letter, this ambivalence recurs often enough to convince the reader that these contradictory feelings became the 94 driving forcebehind Wright's poetic vocation. This preoccupationwith home remained with Wright throughout his life, a fact that ties him to such other Appalachian writers as Thomas Wolfe, Edward Abbey, and Chris Offut, all of whom left the region in order to understand it better by coming to terms with their troubling youthful experiences through writing autobiographically-based works while living in self-imposed exile. In an early letter to Robert BIy, written on the day Wright received his copy of The Fifties, the journal that influenced his use of the deep image so effectively, he discusses his lyrical attraction to and personal alienation from Appalachia, both of which hurt him into poetry: [...] when I was young, I wanted to be a poet like Walt Whitman, and I hated the God damned place where I was born (Ohio) enough to try it at least. To be like Whitman meant trying to be original. I had no illusion that this was not difficult, but I had nothing to lose, and I didn't give a damn about that unspeakable rat-hole where I grew up. (112) Although such alienation inspired Wright early on, it began discouraging him by the time of Saint Judas since it created a crises in his poetic aesthetic. Until Wright received The Fifties, he had come to believe that "the images of the slag heaps and the black trees and the stool-washed river and the chemicals from the factories of Wheeling Steel, Blaw Knox, [and] the Hanna Coal Co." were unworthy poetic subject matter scorned by the literary establishment. Bly's theories on surrealism and free verse as well as the poems he included in his journal, however, showed Wright what he had always intuited while reading Whitman, Rilke, and Hölderlin—"that one ought first to journey into himself, and determine whether or not he is a poet" with all the troubled images of home that he carries around with him rather than to try to invent a poetic persona that does not exist. Similar insights about Wright's ambivalence toward the region...