Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
God's Silence
God's Silence | Franz Wright
1 post | 2 read
In this luminous new collection of poems, Franz Wright expands on the spiritual joy he found in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. Wright, whom we know as a poet of exquisite miniatures, opens God’s Silence with “East Boston, 1996,” a powerful long poem that looks back at the darker moments in the formation of his sensibility. He shares his private rules for bus riding (“No eye contact: the eyes of the terrified / terrify”), and recalls, among other experiences, his first encounter with a shotgun, as an eight-year-old boy (“In a clearing in the cornstalks . . . it was suggested / that I fire / on that muttering family of crows”). Throughout this volume, Wright continues his penetrating study of his own and our collective soul. He reaches a new level of acceptance as he intones the paradox “I have heard God’s silence like the sun,” and marvels at our presumptions: We speak of Heaven who have not yet accomplished even this, the holiness of things precisely as they are, and never will! Though Wright often seeks forgiveness in these poems, his black wit and self-deprecation are reliably present, and he delights in reminding us that “literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.” But in this book, literature wins as well. God’s Silence is a deeply felt celebration of what poetry (and its silences) can do for us. From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
Pick icon
100%
review
Thndrstd
God's Silence | Franz Wright
post image
Pickpick


Franz Wright's poetry encapsulates many things - his deep Catholic faith, his recovery from drug addiction, the struggle to express everything he feels. In this, he finds light and dark, very high highs and very low lows. Even at their darkest, though, Wright finds hope. A beautiful collection by a wonderful poet.