American Rendering: New and Selected Poems (review)

George Orwell, in "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," pictured the life of a drudge whose job requires "constantly inventing reaction towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever." Rarely is he assigned a book that gives him any joy. Although I have never had to review books for a living, at times when facing a nosegay of new poetry collections I have felt like Orwell's unhappy drudge, dawdling and putting off the agony of reading the stuff until his deadline nears and the hand of the clock frightens him into action at last.

Fortunately, I had no such difficulty in facing this choice selection of Andrew Hudgins's work of the past quarter-century. It was an assignment I took on willingly. For a long while Hudgins has been one of those poets whose name on a table of contents prompts me to turn at once to his contribution, with the hope of being regaled. Ever since his first collection, Saints and Strangers in 1985, Hudgins has been branded as a narrative poet—not that storytelling is the only string to his lyre. Some of his stories in verse enlist our attention from the very first line, as does "Something Wakes Me Up":

Something wakes me up. I sit and listen.A soggy rasp. A pause. Another rasp.Someone is sawing. Not wood: it's too soft for wood.There are two of them. They're trying to be quiet,whispering but loudly. I part the blinds and look.They've got it strung up from the swing set,tongue bulging out, eyes huge with gravity.

Soon we learn that these stealthy surgeons are dismembering the carcass of a doe, as the speaker watches from his window, appalled. "Saints and Strangers," the title poem of the book, is a series of recollections by a whoop-and-holler preacher's daughter who grows up fast. She watches two drunken hunters beat up her father at a tent meeting, goes skinny-dipping in a baptismal font, steals coins from an offering plate (to leave for a waitress at a truck stop, whom Daddy hadn't tipped), takes a kiss on the mouth during a church service, marries and has babies, sheds one husband for another, and later cares for her deluded Daddy in his senility. Her stories sound genuine, as does the language she tells them in.

A longer-sustained narrative sequence is the impressive "After the Lost War" in a book of the same name (1988), which won the Poets' Prize. Hudgins has characterized the series as "an historical novel in verse that masquerades as a biography of Civil War veteran and poet Sidney Lanier." Fifteen of its poems represent it in this new-and-selected. Written in Lanier's voice, moving in and out of chronological order, the poems recall the poet-soldier's childhood, days in the Confederate army ("At Chancellorsville," "Burial Detail") and later hard times when the war is over and Lanier is in Montgomery, striving to finish his war novel Tiger-Lilies. (There, by the way, is a grossly neglected book that cries out to be reprinted.) Broken in health, the poet faces death. In the end, in "The Hereafter," he mulls over the possibilities of an afterlife, and skeptically observes,

For so long I have thought of us as nailsGod drives into the oak floor of this world,it's hard to comprehend the hammer turnedto claw me out.

While growing up, Hudgins followed his father, a career air force officer, to New Mexico, Ohio, California, England, France, and elsewhere, but in his work the South looms large. The Glass Hammer, his 1996 collection, is entirely made up of story-poems recalling his Southern childhood and early maturity. In fact, growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, he went to Sidney Lanier High School, then to Huntingdon College, where, to his surprise, he had a teacher given to higher criticism of the Bible and to pointing out its inconsistencies. Still, among...