The Beforelife: Poems - Couverture rigide

Wright, Franz

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0375411542 ISBN 13 : 9780375411540

Editeur : Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Synopsis

Book by Wright Franz

A propos du livre

Extrait

"Empty Cathedral"

There’s this pew
at the back
that’s been
waiting
for you
all your life, like your death bed.
Christ Criminal
hanging
above, eyes and mouth
closed suggesting
before you too enter
the third person, light
one candle
for the here,
will you.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

"Thanks Prayer at the Cove"

A year ago today
I was unable to speak
one syntactically coherent
thought let alone write it down: today
in this dear and absurdly allegorical place
by your grace
I am here
and not in that graveyard, its skyline
visible now from the November leaflessness
and I am here to say
it's 5 o'clock, too late to write more
(especially for the one whose eyes
are starting to get dark), the single
dispirited swan out on the windless brown
transparent floor floating
gradually backward
blackward
no this is what I still
can see, white
as a joint in a box of little cigars-
and where is the mate
Lord, it is almost winter in the year
2000 and now I look up to find five
practically unseeable mallards at my feet
they have crossed
nearly standing on earth they're so close
looking up to me
for bread-
that's what my eyes of flesh see (barely)
but what I wished to say
is this, listen:
a year ago today
I found myself riding the subway psychotic
(I wasn't depressed, I wanted to rip my face off)
unable to write what I thought, which was nothing
though I tried though I finally stopped trying and
looked up
at the face of the man
directly across from me, and it began
to melt before my eyes
and in an instant it was young again
the face he must have had
once when he was five
and in an instant it happened again only this
time
it changed to the face of his elderly
corpse and back in time
it changed
to his face at our present
moment of time's flowing and then
as if transparently
superimposed I saw them all at once
OK I was insane but how insane
can someone be I thought, I did not
know you then
I didn't know you were there God
(that's what we call you, grunt grunt)
as you are at every moment
everywhere of what we call
the future and the past
And then I tried once more
experimentally
I focused
on another's face, no need to describe it
there is only one
underneath
these scary and extremely
realistic rubber masks
and there is as I also know now
by your grace one
and only one person on earth
beneath a certain depth
the terror and the love
are one, like hunger, same
in everyone
and it happened again, das Unglück geschah
you might say nur mir allein it happened
no matter who I looked at
for maybe five minutes long enough
long enough
this secret trinity
I saw, the others
will say I am making it up
as if that mattered
Lord,
I make up nothing
not one word.
From the Hardcover edition.

Revue de presse

"This luminous, courageous book is about all of us--about our daily torment and redemption, which we dare not speak even to our souls. But Wright has done so."

--Olga Broumas, author of
Rave: Poems, 1975-1999
"These poems break me; they're like jewels shaped by blunt, ruined fingers--miraculous gifts. At any one time only a handful of genuine poets reside on the planet. I consider Franz Wright to be one of these, and I'm grateful that we have him among us."

---Denis Johnson
"Writers who are genuinely original, who beat their own path, make up a kind of visionary company, to which Franz Wright, with this new book, must clearly be admitted. These poems seem haunted by their own dark imaginings, yet at surprising moments turn all of a sudden humorous, if mordantly so. Reading them will train readers to stay alert for whatever devastating surprises may be coming up next."

---Donald Justice
"In a language waking from delirium, these astonishing poems offer---in their spare, raw, and pure lyric clarity---the prayers of madness and the light of its aftermath. Wright is a poet apart in his gifts and his courage."

---Carolyn Forche

"Intriguing and always accessible, with no 'irrelevant / lies,' this book will expand the audience for poetry by showing readers that, in spite of stunning obstacles, it is always 'possible to live.'"
--Library Journal
"In these short meditations of anguish and hope, Wright achieves the clarity of 'seeing,' and a hard-won wisdom as well."--Kirkus Reviews
" 'Beforelife': the word is so striking that the halting suspence of a double-crostic puzzle overhangs the book, as each poem individually withholds final definition. These poems brilliantly duplicate the willfulness and self-spite of the drinker's impulse ... they're mostly miniatures, the beginnings or endings of Hopperesque stories with a European gloss, their diction mixing mid-American colloquial speech and turns that evoke out-of-context translations."--Elizabeth Macklin, The New York Times Book Review
From the Hardcover edition.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Date d'édition: 2001
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0375411542
• ISBN 13: 9780375411540
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 75
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Authorised Representative Service; ar.info@doceupoint.com; ; 77 Camden Street Lower; Dublin; Dublin; D02 XE80; Irlande