346
... I saw
the ocean river and the sharks hanging
under the saragassum weed lines,
a blue river in green water,
and the sharks staring back, sinking
down listlessly into darker water:
the torpor of heat, a hundred low tide
nights begging a forgetfulness
I haven't quite earned.
PARTISAN REVIEW
Through backwaters, flood plains, and the river towns of Europe
and the Americas, the reader of poetry discovers
The Theory
&
Prac–
tice oj Rivers.
The poems in this collection
are
earned.
Going North In Winter
is a letter-pressed, hand-bound pamphlet
of ten poems by Franz Wright. In this little edition he creates a tone
which is quiet, yet commanding-and very disconcerting. The work
has a haunting and mysterious presence. The short poems are
dramatically enhanced by end- and mid-punctuated lines, a craft
that slows the poems down and gives them an eerie quality.
Joseph Come Back As The Dusk
1950-1982
The house is cold. It's raining ,
getting dark. That's Joseph
for you : it's that time
of the day again .
We had been drinking, oddly enough .
He left.
I thought, a walk–
It's lovely to walk .
His book and glasses on the kitchen table .
Despair and loss are countered by the need for salvation, which
most often arrives in the crystallized form of an image. He is the
"strange elderly child" ("Untitled") brooding in the empty house,
waiting for a loved one to return. His poems fill the emptiness.
It
was necessary for him to write them: they are his work. "The way I
work is strange.! .. . you would not call it work! .. . work is not
the term . . .!It destroys me, I adore it."
STUART DISCHELL
