Loosening Up

Given the fact that I thoroughly enjoy his poetry, I'm a bit puzzled as to why I've been making such slow progress in James Wright's Above the River - The Complete Poems. I seem to have been reading it forever, yet I'm not even halfway through, just approaching the end of his 1963 collection The Branch Will Not Break. I suppose this is something to do with just how demanding the early poems in his first two books are, but wonderfully so. They are uniformly brilliant in terms of the command of the formalities of metre and rhyme, and as uniformly dense in terms of depth and complexity. Most of them demanded at least three concentrated, intense readings, and usually required further detached analysis of individual bits to figure out how they were meant to fit into the whole.

The big surprise after that is just how loose Wright's work becomes (or seems to become) in his third collection. There are a couple of formally structured pieces but other than those most of The Branch Will Not Break reads like the work of a different poet entirely, one with a healthy contempt for regularity in any form. What happened? I don't know, though I suppose someone somewhere does - but I'm glad it did happen. Not because I think the poems are better in any real sense, but because they open up new ground, almost a new sensibility.

In fact, the first poem of Wright's I ever came across is from this collection, and it's one of those rare poems that instantly tells you the writer is the real thing. I reckon it's a useful test case for any reader in terms of whether you're capable of genuinely responding to poetry at all. If A Blessing doesn't send shivers down your spine instantly, I'm afraid you've got no soul.