Kindertotenwald: Prose Poems

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 030727280X, Hardcover)

A groundbreaking collection from Franz Wright in which the most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythm announce a new path for this award-winning poet.

In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “Yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us. He introduces us to the powerful presences in his world (the haiku master Bashô, Nietzsche, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially his father, James Wright) as he explores the continually unfolding losses of childhood and the mixed blessings of adulthood.

Can I ask you a question? Those moths in November, where are they now do you think? You remember. We’d see them each evening around three in the afternoon; first a few, a mere bucketful, and all at once millions, everywhere. The cold came, the cold that really means it, and they were gone. They simply vanished, the way we all do in the end, but what does that mean? What does it mean, to say “Where are they?” Where are we?

These haunting pieces deliver a diary of the poet—“a fairly good egg in hot water,” as he describes himself—who seeks to narrate his way through the dark wood of his title, following the crumbs of language: “Take everything,” he suggests, “you can have it all back, but leave for a little the words, of all you gave the most mysteriously lasting.”