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Here the prevailing tone is despondent. "Certain Tall Buildings," for example, begins: "I know a little / about it: I know / if you contemplate suicide / long enough, it / begins to contemplate you." The poem closes with the line "Don't leave me here without you," ending on a note of desperation. In much of Wright's later work, this sense of peril and abandonment would not go unaddressed but would be assimilated into a larger perspective. Earlier Poems gives us a better understanding of the silence that so many of his later poems take as a point of departure. The poems gathered here reveal despondency in a raw and honest way, just as his newer poems express spiritual joy and struggles without reticence.

In all his work, early and late, Wright is drawn to polarities that yield glimmers of clarity, moments of spectacular, sometimes crushing, illumination. "The Only Animal" (from Martha's Vineyard) is a case in point: "The only animal that commits suicide / went for a walk in the park." Here, characteristically, being human is defined in extremes: to be human is to be a sentient animal able not only to conceive its own death but to bring it about by its own accord, yet also capable of enjoying the leisure and peace of a walk in the park, that quintessential quotidian pleasure. "A Successful Day (Fill in the Blank)," from God's Silence, works on the same principle:

What have I ever gained by (1) answering the telephone
(2) reading the newspaper
(3)         

This morning I had supper with the infinite.

This incongruous combination—yoking desperation, the routine, a sense of loss, and a degree of shock at encountering an evidently benign all-powerful force—is served up in a perfectly judged deadpan voice. So too, in the same volume, with the poem "Introduction," which refers back to Rilke:

And either I am too alone
or I am not
alone enough
to make each moment
holy

(No one bats 1000, friend
no one
bats 500)

And I have heard God's silence like the sun
and sought to change

Now
I am just going to listen to the silence

till the Silence.

Without the delicate balance Wright achieves here, the demotic authority of "No one bats 1000, friend," this could easily slip into kitsch.

Wright's later work routinely succeeds in just this way: by defining and redefining what it is to be human, to be lonely, desperate, confused, to desire to overcome that very self and find resurrection, to find joy and wonderment in the midst of the ordinary.

Nate Zoba is a writer in Chicago.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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