Black Zodiac

""Out of any two thoughts I have, one is devoted to death,"" proclaims Wright in this ominous collection of new work. Perhaps because these poems were written around his 60th birthday or perhaps because an imperative moves all good Southern writers to flirt with dissolution, Wright has begun to consider the end that nears. On these pages he creates and explores an almost surreal present purgatory built from varying amounts of Zen Buddhism, memories, paradox and pastoral opulence. Gertrude Stein, Sappho, his physician and a golf buddy all cast their influence. The language is lilting and pacific even as its embedded imagery disturbs: ""Honeysuckle and poison ivy jumbling out of the hedge,/ Magnolia beak and white tongue, landscape's off-load, love's lisp"" (""Apologia pro Vita Sua, III""). Attachment to the things of the world tightens: ""Swallows darting like fish through the alabaster air,/ Cleansing the cleanliness, feeding on seen and the unseen./ To come back as one of them!"" (""Meditation on Song and Structure""). On the page, as always, Wright's passages refuse to cohere into peaceful stanzas. Scattered and making a break for the right-hand margin, the lines add to the unease that haunts the book, magnifying a nagging sense of disorder and mortality amid an effort at resignation. (Apr.)