Review by New York Times Review
Poems that shun trickery and flirt with both beauty and boredom. ASKED why so many of his poems seemed animated by unhappiness, unhappiness, Philip Larkin once told an interviewer, "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." A supremely cynical thing to say - but also backhandedly romantic, isn't it? A dreadful muse is still a muse. Like Larkin, Tony Hoagland seems to draw inspiration and fluency as a poet from his disappointment and frustration as a human being. And like Larkin's, Hoagland's poems, though chockfull of grousing, are so fully alive to the rich, dark depths of their grumpiness that they constantly threaten, against their author's gimlet-eyed better judgment, to become beautiful. The bulk of Hoagland's grievances have to do with the banality, greed, profligacy and perverse sense of entitlement that characterize American culture. Perhaps this collection's emblematic moment is the one in "Hard Rain" in which the poet hears a Muzak version of Bob Dylan's Cassandrian "Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" "played softly by an accordion quartet / through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall" and wearily concludes "there's nothing / we can't pluck the stinger from, / nothing we can't turn into a soft-drink flavor or a T-shirt." It can seem as if Hoagland's shooting fish in a barrel at moments like these. Any pierced undergraduate in a Baudrillard seminar can tell you that in contemporary America "Nothing means what it says, / and it says it all the time." On the other end of the credulity spectrum, Hoagland's efforts in poems like "Field Guide," "Sentimental Education," "Nature" and "Barton Springs" to make like Thoreau and "turn and run back the other way, / barefoot into the underbrush," away from the parking lots and strip malls and into nature's anodyne, can come off as farcically sentimental and unconvincing. Where Hoagland succeeds, sometimes brilliantly, is in those poems in which he neither rails against the food court with formulaic sarcasm nor forces forest epiphanies, but instead abides wherever he's found himself, reflects rather than reacts and struggles to meet what he's seeing with a sensibility stripped of any traces of cant. The sight of a building undergoing demolition could quickly have led to a sneering poem about wastefulness, or a smarmy one about nature's reclaiming dominion from civilization. Hoagland's trenchant candor and associative leaps prove far more engaging than either of those easy choices: At his best, Hoagland rejects both the cynic's lie that everything superficially beautiful must be rotten underneath, and the romantic's lie that everything apparently ugly must possess some essential nobility. The protean genuine slips through such crude formulas; to believe otherwise is to lose your place among - in Larkin's phrase - "the less deceived." "I don't / believe in the clean break," Hoagland writes; "I believe in the compound fracture / served with a sauce of dirty regret." But a poet who declares falsity his mortal enemy faces something of a conundrum, since, as Plato complained, poetry itself is inherently delusive. To establish his bona fides as a truth teller, to convince us he's not himself a con man, Hoagland takes care to make his poems ruthlessly unpoetic. If, as Auden said, poetry is best defined as "memorable speech," then some of Hoagland's poems may not be poems at all, since you're not likely to get lines as lax as these stuck in your head: Predictable adjectives, dull verbs, zero tension in the line breaks, no discernible effort at musicality. If you're sufficiently attuned to Hoagland's sensibility, you'll see his forceful rejection of poetry's tricks of the trade as indicative of his determination to tell the truth and tell it straight, and you'll thank him for it. If you're not, you'll just be bored. A plain-spoken poetry like Hoagland's can create a terrific, even conspiratorial sense of intimacy with those readers who are sympathetic to it, but offers few pleasures to those who aren't. Hoagland often uses the first-person plural pronoun when staking out a universal claim, as in the lines from "Hard Rain" quoted above, and in poem-ending zingers like "That was the only kind of freedom / we were ever going to know" and "So we were turned into Americans / to learn something about loneliness." On these occasions, you're either going to have the voluptuous sensation of being included in that "we," or you're going to look over your shoulder, wondering whom Hoagland is talking to. Joel Brouwer's most recent poetry collection is "And So." He teaches at the University of Alabama.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 7, 2010]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hoagland's fourth collection finds him cynically observing America during and after the Bush presidency. The speaker of these poems is deeply disheartened by his country and his own complacence, though far from unable to churn up good-natured jokes out of the mess. "After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall/ played softly by an accordion quartet/ through the ceiling speakers at the Springsdale Shopping Mall,/ I understood there's nothing/ we can't pluck the stinger from," opens "Hard Rain." Near the end of the same poem, Hoagland admits, "I used to think I was not part of this,/ that I could mind my own business and get along,// but that was just another song." Hoagland has much in common with the popular Billy Collins-a sharp, if deadpan, wit; accessible, almost prosey lines; a penchant for self-consciously drawing the reader's attention to the artifice of the poem-but with a more musically attuned ear and a darker outlook: "I was driving home that afternoon/ in some dilated condition of sensitivity/ of the kind known only to certain poets/ and more or less everybody else." At his best, Hoagland is capable of showing us how truly marvelous "our marvelous punishment" can be. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"I wanted to get the cement truck into the poem/ because I loved the bulk of the big rotating barrel/ as it went calmly down the street,/ churning to keep the wet cement inside/ slushily in motion." And just like that-because "you want[ed] to talk about America," after all-a cement truck joins the playground swing, a corn-chip factory, Britney Spears, the DC sniper, jazz music, and an amazing assortment of other ingredients, not the least of which is Jimmy's Wok and Roll American-Chinese Gourmet Emporium, all of which divine and define the brilliant and delightful landscape of Hoagland's world. Hoagland (What Narcissism Means to Me) has fun in these poems but always in service to a smart and insightful notion. He also takes great risks in his unsettling juxtaposition of diction and his curiously diverse subject matter, and he is as ready to express confusion, outrage, and anger as he is to display outlandish humor. Verdict These poems are meant to shake up an already shaken world. But then, "this is no/ ordinary snowglobe." Highly recommended for all collections.-Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
