Walking to Martha's Vineyard Book

This book matters to me. Here I've found phrases, images and ideas that bludgeon like a hammer or caress like a feather. Here I recognize a God I know. The God of recovering drug addicts and booze hounds, the God you turn to when it's three am and you're convulsing and shivering on the bathroom floor, the God I turned to when I was a young man and I had shipwrecked against the shoals of my own fucked up self. Wright writes about a Catholic God, about 5am masses, signs of the cross, and the fearful, stumbling roadblock and freedom of the path of Christ but he does it with a Zen-like lucidity and minimalism that is utterly like anything else I've read in traditional religious literature.

Wright get the absurdity of religion, of hoping against hope that there is some power out there, up there, somewhere, who gives a rat's ass about our existence. He gets the bigger impossibility too: the fact that we exist at all. The wonderful mystical `itness' of our paltry, gorgeous beyond reckoning lives. He writes beautifully about beautiful things. He writes about lives that have been wrecked and mosiaced back to some semblance of order and meaning through something that some people call grace, something so small and minute, that it remains impossible to prove except, maybe, through poetry.

I don't even know any longer if I worship the God that Wright does, but reading these poems brought tears to my eyes, shudders of recognition and what I once would've marked as a `presence' of 'the other'. And while I might have grown too cynical to chase after the sacred with the abandon of Franz Wright, his poems have once again brought me to the place in my own life where I can recognize that such beautifully harebrained interior meanderings can still have a lasting value even in an age as soul-sick and ruthlessly materialistic as our own.


Thanks to Paul Bryant, Data Recovery God.