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Earlier Poems
The haunting collection of poems that gathers the first four books (The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes , Entry In An Unknown Hand , The Night World and the Word Night and Rorschach Test) of Pulitzer winner Franz Wright under one cover, where “fans old and new will find a feast amid famine” (Publishers Weekly), and discover how large this poet’s gift was from the start.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
- GenresPoetry
272 pages, Hardcover
First published May 8, 2007
16 people are currently reading
157 people want to read
About the author
Franz Wright
51 books119 followersBorn in Vienna, Franz Wright is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Knopf 2003) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His newest collections, God’s Silence, and Earlier Poems were published by Knopf in, 2006 & 2007. Wright’s other books include The Beforelife (2001), Ill Lit: New and Selected Poems (1998), Rorschach Test (1995), The Night World and the Word Night (1993), and Midnight Postscript (1993). Mr. Wright has also translated poems by René Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. He has received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wright has taught in many colleges and universities, including Emerson College and the University of Arkansas. He is currently the writer-in-residence at Brandeis. He has also worked in a mental health clinic in Lexington, Massachusetts, and as a volunteer at the Center for Grieving Children.
Franz Wright, son of the poet James Wright, began writing when he was very young. At 15, he sent one of his poems to his absentee father, who wrote back, “You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.” James and Franz Wright are the only father and son to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In a short essay on writing, Franz writes, “Think of it: a writer actually possesses the power to alter his past, to change what was once experienced as defeat into victory and what was once experienced as speechless anguish into a stroke of great good fortune or even something approaching blessedness, depending upon what he does with that past, what he makes out of it.” Charles Simic has characterized Wright as a poetic miniaturist, whose "secret ambition is to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover." Time and again, Wright turns on a dime in a few brief lines, exposing the dark comedy and poignancy of his heightened perception.
Franz Wright, son of the poet James Wright, began writing when he was very young. At 15, he sent one of his poems to his absentee father, who wrote back, “You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.” James and Franz Wright are the only father and son to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In a short essay on writing, Franz writes, “Think of it: a writer actually possesses the power to alter his past, to change what was once experienced as defeat into victory and what was once experienced as speechless anguish into a stroke of great good fortune or even something approaching blessedness, depending upon what he does with that past, what he makes out of it.” Charles Simic has characterized Wright as a poetic miniaturist, whose "secret ambition is to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover." Time and again, Wright turns on a dime in a few brief lines, exposing the dark comedy and poignancy of his heightened perception.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
July 10, 2019
I don't think I will ever recover from this.
March 6, 2022
There were lines I really enjoy and allowed me to look at the world differently. I will truly never see leaves the same as I did before reading Wright's poetry. But I did find it very depressing in a way that left me unsettled rather than seen personally. I think his poetry is worth reading. I'm just not sure I need this thick of a book of his.
January 28, 2022
The collection includes poems from four of Franz Wright's early books:
The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes
,
Entry In An Unknown Hand
,
The Night World and the Word Night
, and
Rorschach Test
...
From The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes ...
From Entry In An Unknown Hand ...
From The Night World and the Word Night ...
From Rorschach Test ...
From The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes ...
It is still more light
than glass.
*
Though it leans halfway
into the invisible
it has a seam,
like a dress;
it sings
when you blow into its lips.
*
Since it is so empty and clear
it fills up the imagination,
makes me want to bring some well water
in a sieve
after setting fire to the barn
with a magnifying glass in the moon.- Old Bottle Found in the Cellar of an Abandoned Farmhouse, pg. 22
From Entry In An Unknown Hand ...
And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.
By some inexplicable oversight
nobody jeers when I walk down the street.
I have been allowed to go on living in this
room. I am not asked to explain my presence
anywhere.
What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and
are any left unexecuted?
Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking
certain jobs?
They are absolutely shameless at the bank -
you'd think my name meant nothing to them. Non-
chalantly they hand me the sum I've requested,
but I know them. It's like this everywhere -
they think they are going to surprise me: I,
who do nothing but wait.
Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up -
very clever.
They think that they can scare me.
I am always scared.
And how much courage it requires to get up in the
morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates
you!
At no point in the day may I fell to my knees and
refuse to go on, it's not done.
I go on
dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,
accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white
laughter and applause,
past a million unlighted windows, peered out at
by the retired and their aged attack dogs -
toward my place,
the one at the end of the counter,
the scalpel on the napkin.- Entry in an Unknown Hand, pg. 83-84
From The Night World and the Word Night ...
Whether I grow old, betray my dreams, become a ghost
or die in flames
like Gram,
like Frank,
like Thomas James -
I think for a while I'll come back
as a guest to a childhood room
where the sun is the sun once again
and the wind in the trees is the wind
in the trees, and the summer afternoon
the endless summer afternoon
of books,
that only happiness.
I won't have written this.
Smell of leaves before rain, green
light that shines not
on, but from the
earth -
for me, too,
a hunger darkened the world,
and a fierce joy made it blaze
into unrecognizable beauty.- Jamais Vu, pg. 124
From Rorschach Test ...
Undressing, after working all night,
the last thing I see is the room
in the house next door.
At four in the morning, a dark room
filled with that flickering
blue
so familiar, almost maternal
if you were born
in my generation:
this light
so intimate, reassuring you
that the world is still there
filled with friendly and beautiful people, people
who would like to give you helpful products -
adoring families -
funny Nazis . . .
Undressing, the
last thing I will see.- Late Late Show, pg. 179
December 14, 2019
When Franz Wright was alive, he suffered terribly from the ego of poetry. This often played out in very public dramas that were excruciating to witness and which the author doubtless regretted in more lucid moments. Now that Wright is gone, has been released, the ego-less and generous parts of his poetry remain to accompany us in the sort of disembodied friendship that is poetry's weird quintessence.
Earlier Poems melds Wright's first four full-length books of poetry into one volume. I'd recommend this as a good winter read if you live in a place where the winter brings biting cold and long hours of darkness. The poems are often wintry and the human soul is seen as a crucible, smelting the ore of language to get the base metals with which to make amulet poems to wear to ward off this or that darkness. Franz Wright often wrote apotropaic poems, talismans to protect himself or others...us. I sometimes picture them as Viking jewelry: simple, striking forms.
What I admire about Wright's poetry is its insistence on the use of simplicity of language to achieve complex effects. Wright's poems might be aspersed as confessional, as too naked or emotionally raw, but these accusations usually came later in his career, when his self-excoriations in poetry became more pronounced, when he dealt more openly with his addiction and unpacked his emotional baggage in his books. These earlier poems vacillate between (often very good) imitations of his father's conception of poetry (see poems in here like "The Crawdad") and wondrously spooky latticeworks of aporia which prefigure the author's mature voice. An example of this sort of breakthrough would be the poem "Gone."
I dreamt you came and sat beside me
on the bed
It was something that you had
to tell me.
I dreamed you came and sat beside me
Like a drowning at a baptism
Like an embittered shopper returning
The sad misspelled obscenities on men's room walls
Snow on dark water....Something
While I don't think this early poem is a perfect poem, the spooky turns and particularly that ending presage what is to come in the best poems by this author. It became clear with time his famous father's legacy was as much a curse as a gift, but arguably he separated from that shadow and created his own worthwhile body of work.
You will hear so many poets opine that it's so hard to write great short poems. Wright specialized in the short poem, the lyric burst. And he often did it so well. This collection of collections drives that point home over and over.
Earlier Poems melds Wright's first four full-length books of poetry into one volume. I'd recommend this as a good winter read if you live in a place where the winter brings biting cold and long hours of darkness. The poems are often wintry and the human soul is seen as a crucible, smelting the ore of language to get the base metals with which to make amulet poems to wear to ward off this or that darkness. Franz Wright often wrote apotropaic poems, talismans to protect himself or others...us. I sometimes picture them as Viking jewelry: simple, striking forms.
What I admire about Wright's poetry is its insistence on the use of simplicity of language to achieve complex effects. Wright's poems might be aspersed as confessional, as too naked or emotionally raw, but these accusations usually came later in his career, when his self-excoriations in poetry became more pronounced, when he dealt more openly with his addiction and unpacked his emotional baggage in his books. These earlier poems vacillate between (often very good) imitations of his father's conception of poetry (see poems in here like "The Crawdad") and wondrously spooky latticeworks of aporia which prefigure the author's mature voice. An example of this sort of breakthrough would be the poem "Gone."
I dreamt you came and sat beside me
on the bed
It was something that you had
to tell me.
I dreamed you came and sat beside me
Like a drowning at a baptism
Like an embittered shopper returning
The sad misspelled obscenities on men's room walls
Snow on dark water....Something
While I don't think this early poem is a perfect poem, the spooky turns and particularly that ending presage what is to come in the best poems by this author. It became clear with time his famous father's legacy was as much a curse as a gift, but arguably he separated from that shadow and created his own worthwhile body of work.
You will hear so many poets opine that it's so hard to write great short poems. Wright specialized in the short poem, the lyric burst. And he often did it so well. This collection of collections drives that point home over and over.
December 13, 2025
PUBLICATION DATE
“One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one’s book in the hands of a kindhearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can’t remember what the others
are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private
National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning
and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I’m in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?
A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Federico García Lorca
risen from the dead—
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.”
“One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one’s book in the hands of a kindhearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can’t remember what the others
are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private
National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning
and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I’m in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?
A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Federico García Lorca
risen from the dead—
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don’t worry.”
June 5, 2021
Simply stunning
August 21, 2022
just beautiful, poetry truly is what we stay alive for
February 26, 2015
It's so much fun to read these early poems and think of them in comparison to some of Wright's later work like . Some of them, for me, read like Rilke translations. Here are some of my favorite lines:
And I turn my face from that awful forgiveness.
large house gliding slowly through town on a platform a foot off the ground
And how much courage it requires to get up in the morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates you!
until the jewels roll out of my eyes.
Under anesthesia I walk along a sunflower field I know of
The poem seeks not to depict a place but to become one—
You're dead, but look who's talking.
What am I? A skull biting its fingernails, a
One of the most bothersome things about the mad: they are so often right.
And I turn my face from that awful forgiveness.
large house gliding slowly through town on a platform a foot off the ground
And how much courage it requires to get up in the morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates you!
until the jewels roll out of my eyes.
Under anesthesia I walk along a sunflower field I know of
The poem seeks not to depict a place but to become one—
You're dead, but look who's talking.
What am I? A skull biting its fingernails, a
One of the most bothersome things about the mad: they are so often right.
August 1, 2013
A compilation of earlier published books by this Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry. Wright's poems are beautiful, dark, scary, haunting. But the poems are never without hope or go dwindling into constant despair. They are exploring these feelings, not simply exploiting them for the sake of a beautiful line (though the book is full of stunning lines). It is an amazing collection by a wonderful poet and I highly recommend it.
March 17, 2014
Seeing Alone
Seeing alone
was a door
I walked through
into a higher
and more affectionate
world, dim trees I come upon walking here
presenceless
rustling invisibly
rustling
Seeing alone
was a door
I walked through
into a higher
and more affectionate
world, dim trees I come upon walking here
presenceless
rustling invisibly
rustling
April 13, 2010
amazing collection. my favorite next to dylan thomas
March 20, 2010
This feels like poetry written by a destitute or homeless or semi-homeless person. A drifter. Focuses on small moments and death.
March 6, 2016
Unflinching expression on the big topics of life
September 20, 2017
Not something you do in one sitting, but as all his work, this is powerful, brutal, and extraordinary.
July 29, 2022
I didn't want the book to end. 💛
October 18, 2007
wounded poetry at its pretty good-ist.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews