The Beforelife

by Franz Wright

Overview

In this stunning collection, Franz Wright chronicles the journey back from a place of isolation and wordlessness. After a period when it seemed certain he would never write poetry again, he speaks with bracing clarity about the twilit world that lies between madness and sanity, addiction and recovery. Wright negotiates the precarious transition from illness to health in a state of skeptical rapture, discovering along the way the exhilaration of love--both divine and human--and finding that even the most battered consciousness can be good company.

Whether he is writing about his regret for the abortion of a child, describing the mechanics of slander ("I can just hear them on the telephone and keening all their kissy little knives"), or composing an ironic ode to himself ("To a Blossoming Nut Case"), Wright's poems are exquisitely precise. Charles Simic has characterized him as a poetic miniaturist, whose "secret ambition is to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover." Time and again, Wright turns on a dime in a few brief lines, exposing the dark comedy and poignancy of his heightened perception.

Here is one of the poems from the collection:



Description of Her Eyes

Two teaspoonfuls,
and my mind goes
everyone can kiss my ass now--

then it's changed,
I change my mind.

Eyes so sad, and infinitely kind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307554574
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/24/2010
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Franz Wright, the son of the poet James Wright, was born in Vienna in 1953 and grew up in the Northwest, the Midwest, and northern California. His most recent works include Ill Lit: Selected & New Poems and an expanded edition of translations entitled The Unknown Rilke. He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Whiting Fellowship, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, among other honors. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his wife, Elizabeth.

Read an Excerpt

"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.

Editorial Reviews

The six books that Wright published in the '90s were more or less split between Carnegie-Mellon University and Oberlin College presses, with the latter publishing Ill Lit: Selected Poems to little fanfare in 1998. Clearly, however, Knopf editor Deborah Garrison was paying attention, having made Wright's 13th collection her first for the house since taking over for the late Harry Ford last year. The poems here slowly make explicit a psychologically acute back story, featuring Haldol, codeine, drinking and childhood abuse. (Wright's father was the late poet James Wright.) They depend almost completely on a pared-down, querulous, alternatingly grandiose and self-deflating depression-speak, which can be terrific when on, and much less impressive when even slightly off. A laconic rhythm drives self-revelations like "Not Now": "This mask/ this glove/ of human flesh// is all I have/ and that's not bad/ and that's not good// not good enough// not now." But too many of these short monologues can't sustain their self-reflection, as in "Primogeniture," which opens "My dad beat me with his belt/ for my edification" and closes "may my hand whither// may it forget how to write/ if I ever strike a child." Single lines and thoughts can be better than whole poems--"Dark the computer dies in its sleep"; "...so you are not/ going to hurt me again/ and I, I can't/ happen to you"; "I'll give you something to cry about"--giving this uneven collection depth and credibility. (Jan. 31) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The persona in these poems inhabits a psychic hell poignantly familiar to recovering addicts and to "Franz Wright with his suitcase/ of codeine pills." It is a world where a "guy in white" comes "to see/ if you've killed yourself." In this persona, Wright, son of the celebrated poet James Wright, confronts his alcoholism as "the drunk son of a drunk," a lowly "cockroach/ in a psychiatrist's kitchen," committed because of his "psychotic" visions on a subway train a year earlier. His only salvation is the "word world" where he contemplates the ineffable beauty of mallards swimming in a cove or "January snowfall" clean as a "new page." Addressed to his wife and written between December 1998 and December 1999, the poems are formatted like brief telegrams, shocking in their honesty: "my dad beat me with his belt." 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." Recommended for all general collections.--Daniel Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Beforelife: the word is so striking that the halting suspense of a double-crostic puzzle overhangs the book, as each poem individually withholds final definition.
—New York Times Book Review

Elizabeth Macklin

The dominant moods of Wright's latest work are repentance and resolution. The former covers a lot of territory, but Wright consistently circles back to the prison of addiction—to its vicious cycles and the possibility of release. The poet's Christianity is admittedly unorthodox, but unless we give some credence to the notions of sin (not necessarily original sin), grace, and salvation, we are unlikely to find his vision compelling. Three of the poems are explicit prayers, and many others read like prayers: they dance among the attitudes of atonement, thanksgiving, and petition. The longer, more narrative works do not have the snap and clear vision of his prayerful poems, but this is merely to quibble. In"Primogeniture" he tells of a legacy of child abuse handed down from father to son over generations. It ends on a note of defiance:"So that's how it is done / here, / I thought / and may my hand wither / may it forget how to write / if I ever strike a child." The pun on"write" works on several levels—since Wright's father, James Wright, was also a"writer"—and clarifies the need to work free of inheritance and destructive habit. In these short meditations of anguish and hope, Wright achieves the clarity of"seeing," and a hard-won wisdom as well.

Kirkus Reviews

"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 Publisher