"I wanted to write poems of religious devotion in a less obvious and, I hope, more humble way -- one people might more easily identify with," says poet Franz Wright, and right from the beginning, one senses "Wheeling Motel's" departure from earlier collections.

Its awe is rooted in greater humility and its expansiveness signals a more mature style than his 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning "Walking to Martha's Vineyard." Yet despite the greater reach, even detachment, the lyric intensity never wavers.

Wright's poems are deceptively simple. Like the other poems, "Baudelaire" can be read many times, only to yield further complexities. Its opening salvo from Baudelaire -- " 'When I have inspired universal horror / I shall have conquered solitude' "-- comes to have both less and more in common with the poet's own ending aphorism:

"Evil isn't hard to comprehend, it is nothing / but unhappiness / in its most successful disguise."

Though Wright's work is typically interpreted through the prism of his mental illness and his religious devotion, "Wheeling Motel" resists such reductionist interpretation. One need not have shared the poet's experiences to welcome the beauty of the language, the way the poems unfold into miracles of uncontainable passion. He genuinely believes that:

"I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone."

Consider "Intake Interview," which Wright explains as "an attempt to reproduce my 3 a.m. admission to a mental hospital and the sensation of having an obviously indifferent and jaded psychiatrist fall asleep in the middle of asking me a series of rather idiotic questions."

But lines like:

"Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false? / Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche? / Name five rivers. / What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes?" are as much interrogations of the compliant self by its more restless counterpart, as they are codes of obedience implanted by the bureaucratic imagination.

Wright's relentless self-questioning has enabled him to reach a solidity of perception, which appears as simplicity itself, yet attains a universality transcending specific experience. Consider this from "Why Do You Ask:"

That's right: I breathed

on a little black fly-

husk there on the sill

and it came back to life, why?

Wright says that "poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns." Only the greatest poets have enough confidence not to need to extrapolate and gesticulate when the thought provoked by the image will do. Wright always finds the perfect image for the soul of the poem.

The religiosity is of the transcendent kind our canonical poets, from Donne through Yeats, have bequeathed us. In Wright's words, "What I myself experience is indescribable gratitude in the face of God's perpetual and preemptive love, a love which is not contingent upon requital or even belief in His existence."

Unimprovable poems like "Triptych," "My Pew," and "No Answer No Why" reflect this sublime awareness. As "After Absence" says: "God is love / they say / in human words."

The title poem, addressed to his father, the poet James Wright, who grew up in Martins Ferry, Ohio, across the Ohio River from Wheeling, W.Va., reflects the same search for this manifestation of universal love. What does a great poet hand down to his son, who follows in his vocation?

"There's this line in an unpublished poem of yours. / The river is like that, / a blind familiar." And at the end:

"Then the moon will rise / like the word reconciliation, / like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face."

The continuity consists of a faith whose sincerity and clarity are indisputable. A similar sentiment occurs in "Out of Delusion:"

Thinking the sky is a river of souls

as everyone knows

darkness and blizzards

come from the future

and the road is long

as the memory of a child.

Wright is not working his way around mortality; he is slicing right through it in poems like "Pediatric Suicide," "Professor Alone During Office Hours," "The Problem," and "Abuse: To My Brother."

Wright is one of our handful of poets who has done the most to return poetry to a public art, popular and profound at the same time. Twenty poems from "Wheeling Motel" are set to the music of the band, Ill Lit. His readings represent a pinnacle of undeluded self-acceptance, which is another way of saying, universal compassion -- or "creative awe," to use Wright's own words.

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