Franz Wright's Posthumous Collection 'Axe in Blossom' Reviewed

The New Yorker reviews 'Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments' (Knopf), a posthumous collection of Franz Wright's final poems assembled by his widow Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright after his 2015 death from lung cancer. The volume includes poems dictated into a tape recorder or left as voicemails, and lines found written on walls, appliances, coffee filters, and a Styrofoam Dunkin' Donuts cup. Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for 'Walking to Martha's Vineyard,' maintained a darkly comic, self-deprecating tone even as his body failed. The collection borrows its title from a line by Paul Celan, whose influence is evident in Wright's fragmented style. It includes homages to Celan, Czesław Miłosz, Rainer Brambach, and Karl Krolow. The book moves from finished poems to abandoned drafts to an appendix of 'unfinishable' works, among them 'At His Desk in the Past,' considered a masterpiece. Wright's poetry explores estrangement from the body, addiction, childhood trauma (his father James Wright beat him), and the anticipation of death, often with gallows humor.