Soon After Rain by James Hoggard (review)

In his collection of poetry Soon After Rain, James Hoggard explores the power of weather to create and destroy, to incite fear, surely, but also to bring about a peaceful and abiding rhythm. This rhythm finds its way throughout this group of poems, and indeed Soon After Rain has a central concern using poetic forms, prosody, repetition, and rhyme to evoke in the reader a sense of the majesty as well as the continuity of the natural world and the patterns of weather. Particularly notable in this collection is his use of the pantoum form and its repeating lines that provide a sort of swaying or rolling motion to his poetry. One such pantoum, “When Four Tornadoes Joined,” begins with the line “When four tornadoes joined and hit us hard” (64). By the time that line is repeated, with slight variation, at the end of the poem, the reader has been taken through death, destruction, and new hope, all through the steadily rolling momentum of the pantoum’s repeating lines.

Repetition in these poems serves to remind us how much and how little changes within passing time. In “Father-Son Talk,” each line ends with the word “afford”; moving through the various meanings of that word makes clear both how similar and how different the speaker is from his son (76). The repetition gives the poem’s message a gentility and thoughtfulness that keeps the poem from ever sounding pedantic or condescending, but also clearly expresses the speaker’s frustration at his inability to connect with his son. Other poems in this collection use repetition to evoke the slow chill of an overcast day, the churning drama of a flooded city, or the continuity between the Ninevah of the Bible and the Mosul of today. Hoggard, by using something as simple as ending all the lines of a poem with the same word, shows his mastery of the power of language to bring to mind an image or create a feeling of longing, fear, or loss.

Always in Soon After Rain, the poetic techniques and sound serve the meaning. His are definitely not esoteric poems that seek to hide their meaning. Instead, the reader is invited through these poems to enter a world where weather, language, meter, and sound come together to create oftentimes harrowing but always beautiful spaces. In the midst of this collection are five poems called “The Artemisia Suite,” paying homage to the artwork of 17th century artist Artemisia Gentileschi. One of a very few famous women painters of her time, Gentileschi used art to express her own frustration and rage. Hoggard’s poems both acknowledge that rage and attest to the stunning images that Gentileschi created from it, writing about Gentileschi’s painting Judith Slaying Holofernes, “See: a bit of blood has marked her breast / and the trim of the bodice on her dress -- / but stains, she knows, must be endured.” (52). His words are no less evocative of grim sadness and resignation than are the images described.

The author brings this same level of clarity of language and emotional sensitivity to all the poems in Soon After Rain, whether describing a hawk’s flight, Ulysses tilling a field with salt, or a boy pretending to be blind. Particularly notable in its evocative use of imagery is the poem “Sky Over Knossos,” which describes Knossos as “that femininely powerful place / whose huge amphoras and horned parapets / sang sweet worlds through labyrinthine rooms” (36). The rhythm of these lines interplays with the strong visual image they evoke, coming together in a clear yet concise multisensory experience for the reader. This collection as a whole deftly brings to life the feelings of anxiety, anticipation, and awe that come with changes in the weather, and it also hearkens to these same feelings that occur with the passage of time and changes in our own lives. Hoggard explores these different themes with abiding care, sensitivity, and oftentimes gentle words and rhythms that fill the senses not unlike the rain itself.