A few days ago at Isola di Rifiuti, John Latta named C.D. Wright’s “Rising, Falling, Hovering” “the most ambi­tious U.S. anti-​war poem of the bloom­ing idi­otic twenty-​first century.”

Latta being Latta, that praise—and I don’t think it’s ten­den­tious to take it as such—is asserted only after he’s com­pleted his shift of crit­i­cal heavy lift­ing, here cen­tered on the con­nec­tion between the two halves of the poem. (Which, dear reader, I beg for­bear­ance to repeat were first pub­lished in Chicago Review 51:3 and 53:2/3.) Latta writes:

The move­ment between “Rising, Falling, Hov­er­ing” and “Rising, Falling, Hov­er­ing, / cont.” is one of refus­ing surcease, increased con­cern, anger unabated and rising. (Indeed, one fully expects the poem to con­tinue for­ever with purer and purer distill’d rage, dog­ging the “end­less war” sce­nario of the crim­i­nal U.S. policy-​makers.) If the “cont.” story wor­ries about a son trav­el­ing unaccompany’d in Mexico and about tend­ing to a friend’s “bad diag­no­sis” and appar­ent cancer treat­ment in Mexico City (jux­ta­posed against—on the flight down: “The mon­i­tor from the over­head / begins its info­tain­ment Not shown: white phos­pho­rous falling / on the city of minarets”), thus seem­ing to focus in, off the high civic stakes of its beginnings—too, it ends by bray­ing out a mag­nif­i­cent curse…

Latta’s review gives me occa­sion to men­tion that the forth­com­ing issue of CR, due back from the press in a few weeks, includes C.D. Wright’s own take on the poem, an auto­com­men­tary some­what along the lines of the expli­ca­tion de soi-même that John Matthias under­took for CR 52:2/3/4.