Lamentations

Franklin explores exile, identity, and the passage of time in this collection of poems.

The author opens with “Lot’s Lament,” recasting the biblical tale of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt as a metaphor for longing, guilt, and irreversible choices. The narrator is haunted by his wife, stating, “I keep finding / The face that abandons me: still turning, / Too violent and rapid to feel, / Like colors that blend on a spinning wheel.” “Elegy in Broken Stanzas” is a sprawling reminiscence of an intellectual connection between two aristocratic boys. The speaker, fawning over his more popular counterpart, grapples with erotic urges never expressed or acted upon. The book’s midsection consists of the epic-length “Talking Head,” a poem that reimagines the myth of Orpheus through a contemporary lens, exploring the tension between the Apollonian aspects of human nature (order, harmony, restraint) and the Dionysian (chaos, ecstasy, transformation). “The road changes / The road does not change” is the refrain of “Via Dolorosa,” a mournful poem about an elderly man who is “dying of loneliness / Out here in what has become a desert.” The poet concludes with “The Frame,” a meditation on the “sensation of seeing too clearly, / The desolate knowledge of not being seen.” Franklin elegantly weaves sensory details into his poems, as when describing a beach of “fine-grained sand that had been pummeled // By the perpetually grinding ocean.” He deftly captures the pain of aging, writing of a “new chapter of a life / That now feels effectively over, yet refuses, / Adamantly, to relinquish me.” However, the work occasionally suffers from tendencies toward grandiosity, density, and verbosity. “Talking Head” will likely overwhelm and alienate more casual poetry readers in the course of its 40-plus pages of lines like, “Enough sublime, stentorian lines; / It is time, past time: I refuse to ventriloquize, / Charge all to heed the ultimate reprimand / That brave Apollo poured in my stopped ears.”

A philosophically rigorous but often onerous poetry collection.