by Franz Wright
Knopf 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Sacramental, Epiphanic, Zeusian…Moridbund?

God’s Silence weighs in at a generous 144 pages, suggesting that winning the 2004 Pulitzer for Walking to Martha’s Vineyard has not caused Franz Wright to slack off.  This collection is in fact better than Walking to Martha’s Vineyard.  In these new poems Wright allows himself space to relax, to be more openly humorous, and to ring changes on his obsession with failure and forgiveness.  The extra space does not seem self-indulgent.  The repeated themes and refrains are skilful and welcome variations rather than rote exercises, and encourage rereading of those poems thought weaker at first.  Keeping up the formal interest is the fact that the poems collected here range from one-liners to those several pages in length.   Wright’s work is unashamedly sacramental but rarely pious; his acerbic, self-deprecating wit and love of paradox take care of that:

I just noticed that it is my own private

National Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever).

Wright keeps his sacramental refrains from becoming rote.  We sense that each poem is trying to find its own ending rather than conforming to one.  Still, we are not allowed to rest in the sense of a sleepwalking speaker being led by the nose.  Subject matter and tone are subject to often dizzying shifts that are usually kept from being simply surreal by Wright’s drive towards healing and redemption.

There are poems that offer an almost Shakespearean, formed-from-the-head-of Zeus lyric, and there are others like “Publication Date” that appear to stumble into their own epiphanies.  Though these modes often overlap, they seem essential to a sacramental poet who constantly “call(s) to mind Your constant unrequited/ and preemptive forgiveness.” This line, reclaiming as it does the loaded word “preemptive,” seems more effectively political to me than most poems that declare themselves openly.  Wright wants to speak for everybody, and usually makes his case without catechizing or ideological demonizing.  A possible exception to this is “Woods Hole Ferry,” which eloquently calls out (in his completed lyric mode)

the affluent, the users-up, unconsciously remote
from knowing themselves
our owners and starvers, occupying
as they always have the mansions and beauty of the earth

but even here he knows that the constant presence of death is all the demon anybody needs “before/ we all meet and enter at the same door.”

“I refer to mother Morphine’s left tit,” he writes in “Arkansas Good Friday,” which pictures his father (the late Pulitzer-winner James Wright) emaciated by terminal cancer and chemotherapy, turning back into a hairless baby by sucking the only drug that can keep him from unbearable pain.  Twisted as that image is, as real as the pain is, the redemptive paradox of death is not far behind:

How real it all seemed
for a few years, but I was always
immortal and will be
once more, when I return
to the infinite time
which elapsed before I was conceived:

Just as his emphasis on the spiritual begins to wear thin, Wright often abruptly turns to the material, as he does in “The Visiting.”  After describing the hour of insomnia in which “the ones who can’t rest/ go to bed, and the ones/ who can’t wake go to work,” a dash brings “Dark blue morning glory”:  “I reach to touch, there is another world/ and it is this world.”   Another poem hearkening back to the mode where epiphanies are unbidden and unearned is “Poet’s Room in a Museum”:

Three lbs. of sentient meat
afloat
inside a big pickle jar

saying, Where did I come from
Where are my dead friends

which hints at mordant depths—though interestingly, the same brain image appears less abruptly and more positively (in the traditional Zeusian lyric mode) in “The Hawk:” 

I am changing: this three pound lump
of sentient meat electrified
by hope and terror has learned to hear
His silence like the sun

Throughout God’s Silence Wright shows us how the same hopeless, material facts can be transformed by accepting the ambiguity of language (this example from “Home Remedy:” “You have to set the clock—/ for a moment that doesn’t exist yet/ or one that has already passed, interestingly/ symbolized by the same numeral.”

Wait. I take that back about not demonizing.  After they rejected poems which may well have been taken from the manuscript of this book, Wright fired off a string of hilarious emails to the editors of Poetry, which they published in their May 2005 issue.  Apparently, he does retain a chip on his shoulder for “vengeful, petty, reactionary & aesthetically moridbund [sic] freaks” and purveyors of “Neo-Formalist gibberish.”  It is a streak his father had as well, though the hyperbole of the exchange shows the target presented by the freshly-endowed magazine was perhaps too ready-made.  Wright cites a new “clarity” in poetry, but I don’t think of these poems as exhibiting clarity as much as openness to simplicity and paradox, an unashamed acceptance of emotional vulnerability.

These poems embrace the idea that “who’s had to love the madness/ of his loneliness is blessed.”  Wright’s knowledge of madness, and the insistent urge to embrace both the hopelessness of the condemned (“resubmerge this broken/body in the waters of electrocution,”) and the transformation of redemption (“Fill me with love for the truly afflicted/ that hopeless love, if need be/ make me one of them again” keeps his search for spirituality from being sanctimonious, and buttress his sense that even in the face of death, heaven is there for the choosing.  Franz Wright’s ability to give this paradoxically consoling twist to disparate, hopeless, and often ugly images is so reliable that the wonder is how he continues to surprise each time he does it.

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