“Revisiting James Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River at Fifty-One” by Dean Radar (2023)

Radar looks back at Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River 50 years after publication. Although Radar does not specifically mention “Speak,” his description of the collection can be applied to the mood and atmosphere of “Speak.” Many of the poems, Radar writes, are “set against impoverished urban winter landscapes where the lyric self is assaulted by the police, Capitalism, bad luck, dark water, hobo jungles, and the death of the poet’s invented muse, Jenny.” Radar describes Wright’s “‘flat’ […] diction,” which came in for criticism, as “thrifty modes of communication […] The poems are raw, candid, and at times a little desperate”—words that might well be applied to “Speak.”

“The Resurrections of James Wright” by Robert Henriques (2017)

In this appreciative and lengthy review of James Wright: A Life in Poetry, a biography by Jonathan Blunk, Henriques traces the main features of Wright’s life and the development of his poetry as Blunk presents it. Blunk’s biography paints Wright as an poet who “wants to tell the human, often painful, truth […] as a way to survive”—a comment that readers of “Speak” will certainly understand.

James Wright: The Poetry of a Grown Man: Constancy and Tradition in the Work of James Wright by Kevin Stein (1989)

This thorough, informative book traces the evolution of Wright’s poetry. The title is a quotation from one of Wright’s poems. Wright’s work develops from “despair to affirmation” (xii). Stein quotes “Speak” in its entirety and comments that it is a “dark quest for reassurance, a search for spiritual light” (104), but he disputes Wright’s own words that he speaks in a “flat voice.” On the contrary, Stein claims, “The music of the poem is far from flat” (105).