Franz Wright is at his best in this beautiful and startling collection. In these riveting poems, as he considers his mortality, the poet finds a new elation and clarity on the page, handing over for our examination the flawed yet kneeling-in-gratitude self he has become.
Wright declares, “I’ve said all that / I had to say. / In writing. / I signed my name. / It’s death’s move.”
F stands both for Franz, the poet-speaker who represents all of us on our baffling lifelong journeys, and for the alphabet, the utility and sometimes brutality of our symbols. (It may be, he jokes grimly, his “grade in life.”) From “Entries of the Cell,” the long central poem that details the loneliness of the single soul, to short narrative prose poems and traditional lyrics, Wright revels in the compensatory power of language, observing the daytime headlights following a hearse, or the wind, “blessing one by one the unlighted buds of the backbent peach tree’s unnoted return.”
ASIN : B00BO4GTOM
Publisher : Knopf (August 27, 2013)
Publication date : August 27, 2013
Language : English
File size : 946 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 97 pages
