On Franz Wright’s “F”

Franz Wright’s F is a prickly, quirky, not entirely likeable but somehow fascinating collection that kept reeling me back in for one more poem, even as it elicited occasional snorts of exasperation. Wright, it is obligatory if somewhat annoying to note, is the son of revered American poet James Wright, a sturdy, workmanlike sort of proletarian midwestern postwar poet; Wright fils has inherited his father’s Protestant melancholy but without the latter’s resigned stoicism. There’s something overbred and finicky, sort of continental and jaded and lounge-lizardy in Franz Wright’s sensibility; one gets the sense of a highly sensitive, finely tuned instrument that is easily disabled. If he were a pitcher, he would be an erratic lefty with electric stuff who goes to pieces at the slightest hint of adversity and finds ways to lose. Despite the inconsistencies, though the poems in F often crackle with intelligence and a fierce kind of integrity. The central poem, “Entries of the Cell,” is a fully imagined and realized psychic odyssey that feels moving and hard-won. Some of the others, however, especially the prose poems, can be a little hit-and-miss. B-plus.