God's Silence

God's Silence

In this luminous new collection of poems, Franz Wright expands on the spiritual joy he found in his Pulitzer Prize-winning <i>Walking to Martha’s Vineyard</i>. Wright, whom we know as a poet of exquisite miniatures, opens <i>God’s Silence</i> 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:<br><br>We speak of Heaven who have not yet accomplished<br>even this, the holiness of things <br>precisely as they are, and never will!<br><br>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.”<br>But in this book, literature wins as well. <i>God’s Silence </i>is a deeply felt celebration of what poetry (and its silences) can do for us.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>