The Wish Furnace

Thoreau wrote, “…I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” As well as a writer, Randy Blythe has been a plumber, a percussionist, an editor, a teacher, and a farmer. So it’s understandable that a reader will encounter, in The Wish Furnace—Blythe’s second full-length collection—abundant evidence that the poems’ perceiver, like Thoreau, wants to inhabit every human moment. This is difficult, the reason why a Blythe poem that celebrates belief may be followed by a poem bent on questioning belief’s worth. Blythe refuses easy binary thinking when a greater challenge looms. Sometimes labeled “a religious poet,” he denies that descriptor, choosing instead to explore matters of existence and spirit simultaneously, with the relentlessness of a born seeker.