Wright Reaches For Profundity, But Falters

The poems in Franz Wright’s new collection, “God’s Silence,” should be profoundly moving. Wright grapples with depression and thoughts of suicide as he tries to sustain his saving connection with God. The winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Wright has a careful control of language; his line breaks are exquisite and his words never seem out of place.

Unfortunately, “God’s Silence” is disappointing.

Wright relies too heavily on bluntly stated epiphanies, and his sincere lyrical tone soon becomes static. Striking images and strange insights are rare; most of the poems are predictably profound. The ending of “The Knowers” is typical: “dead leaves / come back as green / leaves: only / we / don’t return,” he writes. The smell of snow is a recurring motif in the poems, and there is a certain chilly, blandly poetic quality to the volume as a whole.

It didn’t have to be that way. At a few points, Wright reveals sharp humor and a delightful weirdness. The conclusion of “Od Hearing,” in which the narrator senses his estrangement from the people around him, is a striking blend of vulgarity and surrealism: “Kiss me/an easy death whispers: I want you to/come in my mouth—// Wolves/ with bright amethyst teeth smiling.”

A poem about writing, “Publication Date,” is full of slapstick desperation. The pacing poet is waiting for his latest book to come out, and he expects the worst. The narrator declares early on that it’s “National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day,” a phrase that is very funny in the context of the poem, although it jars with the serious preoccupations of the rest of the volume.

But the poem keeps getting better as it progresses. It concludes irresistibly with the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, reincarnated as a limping sparrow, pronouncing gloomily: “Literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.”

After reading a line like that, it’s frustrating to go back to the solemn self-importance of the other poems. In “Night Walk,” the narrator makes his way to an all-night convenience store that is mysteriously empty. The poem ends with tiresome transcendence. “Walking home, for a moment /you almost believe you could start again. /And an intense love rushes to your heart /and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable,” he writes. These lines could be a microcosm of the whole collection: well-crafted, heartfelt, and boring.

It seems as though Wright has fallen into a poetic trap of his own creation. He explores the old dream of conquering the limits of language in “The Reader.”

“There was no text, only/ what the words stood for / and then // what all things stand for,” he writes.

But this is a dangerous vision for a poet. Wright forgets that poetry’s virtue—its saving grace—is particularity. Readers can access poetry’s meaning only through the nuances of the text, through the heft and rhythm of a single word.

In “God’s Silence,” Wright is too eager to escape into wordless epiphany. Ultimately, his graceful generalities fail to satisfy. .

—Reviewer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.

God's Silence
By Franz Wright
Knopf
Out Now