Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1179981 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-29
• Released on: 2003-07-29
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .52" h x 5.80" w x 8.74" l, .60 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 112 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Known for his work in narrative verse, Hudgins (After the Lost War) mixes taut anecdotes and autobiography with more lyrical work in this sixth effort. The poems continue his attention to middle- and working-class American life, his interest in biblical allegory, and his command of traditional rhyming forms. The memorable title poem recalls kids playing in fog left by DDT trucks; "Come to Harm" considers comedy, grief at the death of parents and interstate car trips: "We sang. We laughed. She died. I wept." Both poems, like almost half the book, skillfully use Hudgins' oft-employed ballad- or hymn-based quatrains and demotic, casual American diction. Hudgins also weaves in Homeric or otherwise archaic effects, while a series of poems about burials and divine retributions (an ancient Russian king; the story of Lot in Sodom) achieve a grim effectiveness that recalls Tom Sleigh's recent work. A third group of poems (scattered throughout the volume) seek lighter topics or tones: "A Joke Walks into a Bar" seeks, and finds, the kind of comic parable associated with Stephen Dobyns, or even Billy Collins, though several poems explicitly about the writing of poetry or (worse) about poetry workshops and classes, offer overfamiliar sentiments. More often, Hudgins participates in traditions of midlife autobiography and eschatology (where "Our nightmares/ alter the historical report") or tracking down, through his speaker's life and other people's lives, "desire, which/ is appetite,/ which is the snake/ that feeds then starves us."
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* In the midst of life, we are in death often seems to be Hudgins' motto, yet no contemporary poet of his distinction writes more of joy and wonder. What he says of his child self in "Blur," one of the masterpieces in his sixth collection, remains true of him: "I understood with horror then with joy, / dubious and luminous joy: it [the earth] simply spins. . . . / It was my duty to stay awake / and sing if I could keep my mind on singing." He has so kept his mind, and in this book he sings literally more than ever before, for many poems here are made of ballad-like quatrains, complete with rhyming second and fourth lines. He sings the context of the odd conception of the book's title in a poem about children dropping their toys to go dance behind a "fog truck"--spraying DDT. He sings of the mordant joke left behind by a tenant who "moved out, died, disappeared": namely, "a Cadillac in the attic!" He becomes a lake singing to a sleepless child, calling her to play, to be sure, but also to "fly deeper, / deeper down, / . . and rise forever / on the dark, unhurried waters of descending." He sings, unforgettably, and as "Blur" attests, of joy in the face of understanding. Ray Olson
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