The Pulitzer Birdhouse: God's Silence

I decided to give Pulitzer Prize-winning author Franz Wright a chance at flight, but found his much-hyped 2006 release "God's Silence" to be a strange mix of boredom and inaccessibility. For me, these two rarely go hand in hand, but Wright gives new meaning to the word “paradox”. The inside cover hails the book as “a deeply felt celebration of what poetry (and its silence) can do for us.” The problem is, “God’s Silence” screams when it should whisper and barely murmurs when it should shout. “East Boston. 1996” doesn’t know when to shut up, and reads like a tiring diatribe that strings together those familiar images we like in a pop poem (deserted cities, ringing telephones, convenience stores, and the goddamn Holocaust) but abandons any sense of cohesion, employing short and sweet cantos that aim at poignancy but only disrupt the flow. He seems to think that separating the last line of a poem from the body will make it stick out, but when its as weak as “what all things stand for,” it just makes you wonder if his faux genius is worth the extra space on the page. Or how about a one-lined poem, like “Love walk with me in the desert, the (italicized) blizzard of Eden.” The italics equate to attempted avant-garde nausea. Nice touch. Nevertheless, Wright has his moments, with some slightly interesting dreamlike abstractions in “Parallel Self”: “Dreamily / smiling / with an ice pick / in my skull / it was all in my mind.” If poems are to be boring, they should at least be understandable. It seems the critics confuse subtlety with apathy, and award prizes to birdhouses.