The Concord Bookshop - Established 1940

A groundbreaking collection from Franz Wright in which the most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythm announce a new path for this award-winning poet.

In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “Yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us. He introduces us to the powerful presences in his world (the haiku master Bashô, Nietzsche, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially his father, James Wright) as he explores the continually unfolding losses of childhood and the mixed blessings of adulthood.

Can I ask you a question? Those moths in November, where are they now do you think? You remember. We’d see them each evening around three in the afternoon; first a few, a mere bucketful, and all at once millions, everywhere. The cold came, the cold that really means it, and they were gone. They simply vanished, the way we all do in the end, but what does that mean? What does it mean, to say “Where are they?” Where are we?

These haunting pieces deliver a diary of the poet—“a fairly good egg in hot water,” as he describes himself—who seeks to narrate his way through the dark wood of his title, following the crumbs of language: “Take everything,” he suggests, “you can have it all back, but leave for a little the words, of all you gave the most mysteriously lasting.”

With a suspense, lyricism, and moral complexity that recall To Kill a Mockingbird and Presumed Innocent, this compulsively readable novel explores what happens when a woman who has devoted herself to ushering life into the world finds herself charged with responsibility in a patient's tragic death.

The time is 1981, and Sibyl Danforth has been a dedicated midwife in the rural community of Reddington, Vermont, for fifteen years. But one treacherous winter night, in a house isolated by icy roads and failed telephone lines, Sibyl takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She performs an emergency Caesarean section on its mother, who appears to have died in labor. But what if--as Sibyl's assistant later charges--the patient wasn't already dead, and it was Sibyl who inadvertently killed her?

As recounted by Sibyl's precocious fourteen-year-old daughter, Connie, the ensuing trial bears the earmarks of a witch hunt except for the fact that all its participants are acting from the highest motives--and the defendant increasingly appears to be guilty. As Sibyl Danforth faces the antagonism of the law, the hostility of traditional doctors, and the accusations of her own conscience, Midwives engages, moves, and transfixes us as only the very best novels ever do.