52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
41. To a blossoming pear tree.
“A profound, somewhat tortured humanity is to be found throughout Wright’s poetry,” says Jonathan Barker in the Reference Guide to American Literature; “This is all we have, is it not? We have our internal life. Our external life is usually asinine….” he quotes Wright saying. I pulled this volume as a result of Hirsch’s How to read a poem and his exegesis of the stunning ‘Hook.’ Wright concerns himself with Italy, with poets, and with beauty and the despair of being human. The titular poem destroys worlds in its final stanza:
Young tree, unburdened
By anything but your beautiful natural blossoms
And dew, the dark
Blood in my body drags me
Down with my brother.
I found myself crying, unaccountably, at the unbelievable sadness of this one poem. Or accountably. Barker suggests that The branch will not break is his best work, I believe I’ll take him up on that.
