Reviews for Walking to Martha's Vineyard

The average rating for Walking to Martha's Vineyard based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-10 00:00:00 Tod Emery Franz Wright and his father James Wright are the only father and son to each win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In addition to a Pulitzer, the two shared other things: alcoholism, manic-depression, and lives shortened by cancer. In my opinion'based only on this, his prize-winning book'Franz also inherited a little more than half his father's genius and a little less than half his talent. But that in itself is enough to make Walking to Martha's Vineyard worthy of a Pulitzer prize. His parents divorced in 1961, when he was eight, and Franz was always haunted by the spectre of his absent father. An alcoholic and serious drug-user by the time he graduated Oberlin in 1977, he managed to write more than ten small volumes of verse in the next ten years, and earn prizes too'including a Whiting and a Guggenheim. But the bottom fell out in 1989, when he was fired from Emerson for drinking, fell into a profound depression and attempted suicide. Even worse, the poems stopped coming. After ten years of drought, his life improved: he married Elizabeth Oehlker, stopped drinking alcohol, experienced a spiritual awakening, and entered the Roman Catholic church. The poetry started flowing again too, and in 2001 he published his first major collection, The Beforelife. Walking to Martha's Vineyard is a moving book'particularly when it speaks of the hunger for fathers and the possibility of spiritual enlightenment. Wright is effective'as was his father'in the evocation of solitude, despair, and sudden illumination, all achieved through stark diction and startling images. Often, when I was reading these poems, I missed his father's distinctive music and gift for architectonic structure, yet I always felt strongly that Franz possessed his father's openness to satori, his compassion, and his unconquerable heart. Oh, and Franz achieved something his father never achieved: a peace, a wisdom, a sense of reconciliation toward the end. I'll conclude with two of Wright's poems. The first is about fathers (God and James W.), the second is an epitaph he wrote for himself. FATHERS Oh build a special city for everyone who wishes to die, where they might help one another out and never feel ashamed maybe make a friend, etc. You who created the stars and the sea-specimens come down, come down in spirit, fashion a new heart in me, create me again' Homeless in Manhattan the winter of your dying I didn't have a lot of time to think about it, trying to stay alive To me it was just the next interesting thing you would do' that is how cold it was and how often I walked to the edge of the actual river to join you EPITAPH Now I'm not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple of things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is not illusory, we are From crimson thread to toe tag If you are not disturbed there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry And I know who I am I'll be a voice coming from nowhere, inside' be glad for me.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-04-23 00:00:00 Michael Brasch 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.