Customer Reviews

Babylon in a Jar: Poems

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"After Muscling through sharp greenery and after lopping humped limbs back as far as lopping shears would take them"

So begins a poem in Babylon In A Jar who's structure and form evokes the mythic narrative quality of the best of Gary Snyder married to the intuitive grasp of rhythm that Dylan Thomas wrote in so well. Hudgins speaks in a common language rich in metaphor of simple moments in life, yet without wallowing in the sentimental.

This is by the far the strongest single voice in poetry to write consistently well - poem after poem, book after book, within the past decade. I checked out five of his titles from the library and opened each at random without disappointment. Nothing good said of this writer should be taken for hyperbole. Babylon In A Jar is among his best.

Each of Andrew Hudgins' books makes one hunger for the next. His work is brilliant, true, and beautifully accessible.

I cannot recommend this book of poetry more highly. I have read Babylon in a Jar, over numerous times and still never grow weary of it. Andrew Hudgins has a way of combining what it is to be spirit and flesh in such a way that comes to terms with the essence of what it is to be human. His poems are funny, difficult, and from the heart. He is a man of experience who is willing to be transparent about his faults and shortcomings as he grapples with the circumstances he has created and the ones he finds himself surrounded by. "In the Red Seats" and "Rain" are powerful poems showing his range from finding the face of God in a drunkard to a poem speaking profoundly of the lives that are sacrificed so we may live. Hudgins merits more recognition than he receives.

I would dare to say that those who have problems with Babylon in a Jar perhaps have not read it closely enough. While what he does here is a great departure from his style in After the Lost War the poems still have a great deal of quality and are linked by the paradox between love and death, or Eros and Thanatos as Hudgins put it when I talked to him today. The dust of Babylon in a jar is a metaphor that can relate to almost every poem in the book, the collection is not haphazard as someone has suggested and while After the Lost War remains my favorite Hudgins work Babylon in the jar has some excellent gems of poetry inside and is eminitely readable.

I have read and re-read this book and always find something new to love. Andrew's narrative southern voice is at once humorous and true. Although his poetry is usually written in playful formalism, there is a bit more of the lyric in this book. His fusion of the divine and the earthy here is particularly effective.

This is the first book by Hudgins that I've read. I've seen his poems in magazines, and those I've seen from Saints and Strangers I really loved. This collection isn't a let down. Hudgins has a definite style that he uses, that can sometimes be hard to understand, but more often than not the poems are good and hit home.

Hudgins's new book is his weakest yet. He has not taken enough time between books, and seems content to slap together whatever verse he has lying around into a new manuscript. When the poet of "After the Lost War" and "The Never-Ending" waxes rhapsodic about a scene in the stands of a baseball game, it is time to reconsider the relationship between poetry and ambition. Is Hudgins's goal to write great poems or to win uncritically lauditory reviews? Even when he's writing shorter, more lyric poems, his imagination works most effectively when shaping larger wholes out of his poems. Even "The Glass Hammer," which contained a disturbing number of weak, anecdotal lyrics, was saved by its overall narrative structure of (mostly) unvarnished autobiography. "Babylon in a Jar," however, shows Hudgins thrashing this way and that, seeking a new direction for his imagination, which seemed mined out by "The Glass Hammer." It is, at best, a transitional volume, and one hopes that he will take more time to craft a more careful collection in the future. Hudgins's reputation is secure. We can wait more than three or four years for a (more) accomplished collection.

Of course, with poetry, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This was recommended to me and I found it to be awful. Too bad there's no zero-star choice in ranking it.