Books like The Branch Will Not Break

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” When I first heard this Emily Dickinson quote, I knew exactly what she meant. After all, I had read The Branch Will Not Break when I was eighteen.It was 1967. I was already writing verse--very bad verse--and immersing myself in Frost, Pound and Stevens, but the wonders of the poems in Wright's third collection were a revelation to me. Sure, some reminded me of Pound's Chinese imitations, and some sounded like the Lorca and Neruda I had read in translation in an anthology of world poetry I once borrowed from the Norwood Public Library. But these poems of Wright's were something else again, surreal yet accessible, crowded with heart-shattering images born in darkness and love, and—perhaps of greatest importance to me then—they were about my America, my Midwest, my Ohio, written in free-verse as immediate and straightforward as the prose of Twain, Kerouac or Kesey—yet well crafted and elegant, with a rich, subtle music.I have to admit, though, not every poem in this little book “blows my top” today like it did back then. After all, Wright's (and his friend Robert Bly's) innovations have been widely imitated throughout the last fifty years, until their “deep image” style (particular their studied use of powerful Anglo-Saxon nouns like "wind" and "stone," "water" and "dark") now seems as familiar a part of our 21st century poetic practice as Miltonic syntax and diction once seemed to the sonnet writers of the 19th century. No, not every poem here still takes the top of my head off. But almost two-thirds of them (32 out of 48 pages) still do.There are at least twelve acknowledged masterpieces in this little book: “As I Step Over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor,” “Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium,” “In Fear of Harvests,” “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” “Lying on a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” “The Jewel,” “Fear is What Quickens Me,” “Two Hangovers,” “Depressed By a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me,” “Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas 1960,” and the inimitable, incomparable “A Blessing.” (Notice that one of the things Wright is a master of is the very, very long title.) But I think there are other poems here just as good as most of the above, such as “Eisenhower's Visit to Franco: 1959,” “The Undermining of the Defense Economy” (political diatribes which are also excellent poems—something very hard to do), and that dark elegy for the frontier, “Stages on a Journey Westward.” And a handful of others too.Perhaps one of the reasons for the book's endearing quality is that for the first time Wright's joy seemed to triumph--occasionally but powerfully--over despair. It it is as if the discovery of a new kind of American speech—far removed from his early formalist verse—caused Wright's spirit to soar. The American darkness, its hunted and its misfits, still haunt his verse, but there are moments here when—like the blue jay in a pine tree featured in “Two Hangovers”--Wright warbles with new lyricism, with even a touch of optimism, convinced that, at least for this particular moment, “the branch" upon which he sings "will not break.”I have chosen three specimens to end my review, the first one because I believe it to be one of the finest examples of personification in American poetry (and also because it shows Wright's gentle humor), the second because it perfectly evokes the countryside surrounding my present home of Columbus, Ohio, and the third because it shows James Wright in one of his (all too rare) moments of perfect joy. HOW MY FEVER LEFT I can still hear her. She hobbles downstairs to the kitchen. She is swearing at the dishes. She slaps her grease rags into a basket, And slings it over her skinny forearm, crooked With hatred, and stomps outside. I can hear my father downstairs, Standing without a coat in the open back door, Calling to the old bat across the snow. She's forgotten her black shawl, But I see her through my window, sneering, Flapping upward Toward some dark church on the hill. She has to meet somebody else, and Its no use, she won't listen, She's gone.FROM A BUS WINDOW IN CENTRAL OHIO, JUST BEFORE A THUNDER SHOWER Cribs loaded with roughage huddle together Before the north clouds. The wind tiptoes between poplars. The silver maple leaves squint Toward the ground. An old farmer, his scarlet face Apologetic with whiskey, swings back a barn door And calls a hundred black-and-white Holsteins from a clover field.TODAY I WAS SO HAPPY, SO I MADE THIS POEMAs the plump squirrel scampersAcross the roof of the corncrib,The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness,And I see that it is impossible to die.Each moment of time is a mountain.An eagle rejoices in the oak trees of heaven,CryingThis is what I wanted.