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Wheeling Motel

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Franz Wright's latest collection of poems, "Wheeling Motel", shows the poet on a more reflective quest concerning his past; the Catholic faith is a sort of cradle for these broken diamonds of poems and reveries about both Wright's own past and some of his original poetic inspirations. Out of the millions of poems written about poor Charles Baudelaire, about whom W.H. Auden once wrote, "a strong man, yet weaker than any woman who has ever walked the earth", I think Wright transcends most of them with his calm yet firm judgment of the poet and his quest to probe the malevolent side of existence: "Evil isn't hard to comprehend/it is nothing/but unhappiness/in its most successful disguise/Evil is hated and feared at least/It is possessed/Unlike mere misery, of a dark glamour nobody pities." These two stanzas speak worlds not only about the legendary Dandy and lyric poet, but is a quietly epic commentary on the nature of evil as a whole.

His tenderness and quest for an answer, a metaphysical question regarding the doomed, addicted, and mentally ill in particular continues on a more serene note. His "No Answer No Why" stares these phenomena full in the face without blinking, also grouping ourselves within this tribe who differ perhaps only slightly from us. "Everyone who wakes up insane/with window and mirror wintry portrait of nowhere/Everyone Lord who wakes up in a cell/Everyone Lord who wakes up in the cancer bed/Everyone walking the streets with no home and intense frowning features of feigned occupation, feigned destination.." Isaiah's "plea for the widow" is here in abundance.

I think it should be stressed that Franz Wright is not a nay-sayer, for all his reflection upon the extremes of misery in human life--there are moments of hilarious dark humor in this collection which betray an artist who knows better than to take himself all that seriously. His mockery of the simplicity of the mental health system, which often reduces the wealth of the human psyche to a few simple questions and answers, can be seen in "Intake Interview", a farcical poetical detournment of the questions asked when one is admitted to a mental hospital. His struggle with and yet firm resolution to Christ's presence in the world and in the human heart is best embodied in "The Pew", I believe, one of the best poems about faith I have ever had the fortune to read.

These poems reflect like a miniaturist mirror, a la James Tate combined with the dark aestheticism of Gunter Eich, of a poet with an agonizingly exquisite sensibility trying to reconcile a chaotic past and a present into which the divine has peered. The most worthwhile poetry collection of 2009.

Wright can be heard reading 20 of these pieces with beautiful ambient background music on the CD "Wheeling Motel", also available from Amazon.com.

Franz Wright is the poet of our generation.
Listen to him read these exquisite poems
Readings From Wheeling Motel

Franz Wright's work gets both sparer and deeper but remains as startling as ever. He's found a faith that never seems to ooze out of his poems but instead gives a place to stand while he looks at a world both painful and beautiful. This is a remarkable follow-up to the sharp-edged poems in "God's Silence" -- the poems are no less sharp in their clarity, but you can't slit your wrists with these. Read "Association," for example, where Wright says, "Dawns when I can't sleep I walk,/in thought, all the way/around Walden.//My father loved Thoreau, I wish/he could have walked there/ with me once,//My hungover Virgil."