Ecstatic in the Poison [Hardcover]

Andrew Hudgins (Author)

Book Description

Series: Sewanee Writers' Series | Publication Date: August 15, 2003

In his sixth book of poetry, Ecstatic in the Poison, National Book Award finalist Andrew Hudgins offers a host of delights. Long known as a composer of innovative, clear-sighted narratives and hard-driving, truth-telling lyrics, Hudgins now digs deep into the biographical and autobiographical, the lyric and dramatic, the comic and elegiac. Drawing on events of childhood and of later years, as well as the real and imagined lives of others, Hudgins brings to life a rich, comedic, and haunting variety of characters: among them a prankster who disassembles a Cadillac and rebuilds it in his attic, Russian soldiers on the verge of execution, frenzied inhabitants of Sodom, along with middle-class husbands, wives, and children. Cameo appearances by Alexander the Great and his horse Bucephalus, God strolling in the Garden of Eden, and Josef Stalin lead the reader through the epochs. In Hudgins's adroit hands, a lake, and even a joke become personified.

Editorial Reviews

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."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 204 pages
• Publisher: The Overlook Press; 1st edition (August 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158567429X
• ISBN-13: 978-1585674299
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,183,879 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andrew Hudgins is the author of seven books of poems, including SAINTS AND STRANGERS, THE GLASS HAMMER, and ECSTATIC IN THE POISON. A finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, he is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Harper Lee Award. He currently teaches in the Department of English at Ohio State University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New York Times Book Review, 12/28/03, January 8, 2004

By 

Sarah Rosenbloom "H. David Rosenbloom" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ecstatic in the Poison (Hardcover)

There is a subversive streak to Andrew Hudgins's orderly, accessible poetry that sets him apart from his more transcendent peers: he consistently undercuts himself. Metaphysically and otherwise, he is forever seeing his life clearly and spilling a Coke on his lap at the same time. Most of this collection balances between irony and awe and seems always about to tip either way. The marvelous opening poem, in which the speaker recalls playing as a child in the ''temporary heaven'' of DDT spray, could only have been written by someone sneakily intimate with both the sacred and profane: there's no condescension -- just a touch of Dickinson -- in his description: ''The white clouds tumbled down our streets / pursued by spellbound children / who chased the most distorting clouds, / ecstatic in the poison.'' Hudgins, whose collection ''The Never-Ending'' was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1991, enjoys being a troublemaker; the conventional surface of his poems makes for a sly disguise as he crosses boundaries and disrupts the ordinary or expected. ''Don't gawk! Why not? It's wrong. / But still I peeked,'' he writes in ''Grandma's Toenails,'' and he doesn't hesitate to tell us what he sees: ''Nails humped and buckled / on calluses . . . what a world / they almost opened!'' Part of what makes Hudgins such a pleasure -- and carries the reader over the occasionally repetitive arrangements -- is his great storytelling gift and his role as an acidly self-deprecating central character. It might seem wrong to praise a collection of poems this way, but ''Ecstatic in the Poison'' reads like a novel.

Reviewed by Matthew Flamm, NYTBR, 12/28/03