Axe in Blossom

“My death is in the second drawer,” writes Franz Wright. “While you’re standing there, would you mind getting me one?”

It is a thrill to be back in these cadences, in his world of exquisite solitude, as he ponders becoming a ghost and returning to a childhood room where, he says, “I won’t have written any of it. / I will have back the rights / of anonymity,” and there is nothing left that anyone can take from him.

Wright’s significant themes shine forth: radical acceptance of his own pain, mental illness, and loss; his belief in the poem’s ability to rhyme with the mysteries of our worldly suffering; his nearly surreal vision of Christian grace.

But most powerful for readers will be the tender force of his imagery—the “green vesperal rain at the screen,” the “long Jeffersonian / $2-bill- / tinted twilight”—and, as he invites us to join him in his nicatorium, the smoking-porch of recovering addicts, the joy of finding this black-humorous voice still alive on the page to meet us.