cover image Kindertotenwald

Kindertotenwald

Franz Wright. Knopf, $26 (128p) ISBN 978-0-307-27280-5

Wright has written frequently of his father, the poet James Wright (1927-1980). His 12th book, all in prose, takes its title from Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, and has its English equivalent in something like “Dead Children’s Wood.” It imagines a son’s life as a kind of living death, one that, as its end nears, has become a forbidding forest of memories where people, places and eras blur together, united by the ’poet’s loneliness and abjection, and, savingly, by the kind of humor that permits endurance: “Sooner or later, like most everyone, I will get down on my hands and knees baa-ing obligingly, offer my throat to the knife, and move on.” In the meantime, the poet fuses Neitzsche’s final moments of sanity; “Husserl’s suspension of belief strategy”; bouts of vomiting before watching CNN; fantasies of a “child psychiatrist” (who “will not be seeing any patients this evening… until she has finished her homework”); dilations upon religious figures, Basho, Kierke-gaard; and walks “On My Father’s Farm in New York City” into a kind of continuous diaristic fairy tale. The result is a set of sad and engaging “I do this, I do that” poems spanning a lifetime spent in search of something, and someone, lost: “I look up, and still you are still nowhere to be seen, still unfound.” (Sept. 7)