Franz Wright’s Final Poems, Reviewed

Celan’s power is tricky to sorb for immoderate writer who did not endure successful a labour campy oregon witnesser his parents taken distant to beryllium murdered by the S.S. It is intolerable to isolate Celan’s aesthetic innovations from his trauma and its humanities meanings; Wright preëmpts that hindrance by presenting his ain suffering arsenic benignant of lame and clumsy. It keeps him, successful these past poems, from putting his digit connected the calamity scale: determination are “so galore things worse than death,” helium writes, and killing, adjacent sidesplitting a fly, is 1 of them. He quotes the haiku maestro Issa:

Oh wherefore would you swat them, the poor
things, forever
wringing their skinny hands

Wright’s assemblage is canine shit, aft all—don’t termination his companions! “More than ever I americium haunted by the lives of the small, brief, powerless, filthy, and poor,” helium writes. But “filthy” suggests thing little than a Buddhist’s committedness to the flies’ well-being. In different poems, Wright has immoderate amusive astatine the disbursal of a cricket (“my person describing you implicit the phone, chronicling your little beingness and reasonably gruesome end, some of america guiltily chuckling”) and a moth (“once it observes you person noticed it oregon fixed immoderate denotation its beingness is simply a nuisance, you volition precise soon find yourself the perpetual loser successful a chronic contention of wills”). We don’t work Wright for the purity of his motivation beingness but for the erratic drama of his bully intentions yielding to blurted reversals and denunciations.

All the unresolved, zigzagging impulses springiness adjacent Wright’s finished enactment present immoderate of the raggedness of drafts. “Axe successful Blossom” is successful each consciousness an unfastened book, practically an unfastened studio. We spot its striking rubric gestate done aggregate phases—in a translation, an archetypal poem, and a collage poem made from lines by Celan, Czesław Miłosz, and Rainer Brambach. There are “Three Homages,” 2 poems called “The Writing” (the second, marked “2,” is presented first), 1 poem called “The Lamp, 2” that insinuates an absent predecessor, 2 called “The Kiss,” and truthful on; the poems reshuffle the aforesaid vocabulary, the aforesaid images, the aforesaid settings and themes. The measurement begins with much oregon little “complete” work, passes done immoderate abandoned drafts, past trails disconnected into an appendix, “Burial Herbs,” which works similar a commonplace publication of maxims, partial poems, and poems nominally implicit but “unfinishable,” successful the consciousness that definite poems, possibly the astir ambitious ones, lone approximate their maker’s vision.

Among the “unfinishables” is simply a poem that I see a masterpiece, astir apt 1 of Wright’s precise best. Dedicated to the German writer Karl Krolow, “At His Desk successful the Past” was “transcribed from self-recorded drafts connected audio,” successful 2012. It’s “raining successful a dormant language” retired the window, arsenic Wright measures the duration of his beingness against assorted phenomena—some brief, similar an infant’s fever, immoderate ancient, similar the stars. The poem, written successful linked prose blocks, is excessively agelong to punctuation successful full, and is rather intricate. But 1 transition gives a consciousness of its eerie logic. Wright describes the words of his poem “still traveling toward the satellite though helium is not determination though helium is not present oregon anywhere”:

AND we’d bash it again wouldn’t we—every past 1 of america choosing precisely what we had been given, a glimpse of a nighttime sky—no—choosing precisely what we had been fixed not to beryllium a entity of infinite diamonds unaware they unrecorded everlastingly oregon beryllium astatine each but a brace of mortal eyes with the glory to spot them, grieving their loss, a glimpse.