Glass Hammer

by Andrew Hudgins

Overview

The Glass Hammer, the fourth book of poems by the celebrated author of After the Lost War, is a southern narrative poem. It tells the story of a boy brought up in a military family in Texas and Alabama, and it is as rich in emotion and experience as any novel, as family life itself. In a sequence of sixty-five short lyrics, the narrator moves from the anecdotal circumstances of his infancy to the rebellions of his youth and adolescence, from the tragedy of his mother's death to the acceptance of his father's disciplinary love. This sequence of poems is human, solid, passionate, rueful, and eminently readable. It is as transparent as a mountain brook and moves as fast. It is as painful and powerful and surprising as first love and first loss.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547630588
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/19/1995
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	97
File size:	153 KB

About the Author

ANDREW HUDGINS is the author of several 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 is a professor emeritus of Ohio State University.

Editorial Reviews

Recounting a childhood spent on military bases in the South during the '50s and '60s, Hudgins's ( The Never - Ending ) new book is not a glass hammer but a sequence of 65 little hammers--poems. He takes the tradition of the Southern narrative poem and gives it a new edge, paring down picturesque elements and allowing only the vital details to make it to the printer. Despite a highly developed technique, his voice has a rough veneer, which he cultivates, and for which he offers no apologies. This combination of craft and grit yields a poetry of aggressive charm. A novelistic quality runs through Hudgins's sequence. Though several familiar characters form the subject matter--the racist grandmother, the fundamentalist Baptist preacher, the author as a book-loving nerd--they are presented with a refreshing objectivity. It's as if Hudgins writes about them just long enough to locate both the demonic and the human, then places them on the shelf for posterity, to begin another poem. His book can and should be read as a chapter in the recent history of the South. It's a deftly composed chapter, conceived without undue glamour, filled with an adult's grateful remembrance and wary respect. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In a series of razor-sharp portraits, Hudgins describes what it is like to grow up in a Southern military family in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, he deftly balances memories of the tough love and flavorsome speech of his childhood (``Hard? You don't know what hard is, boy:/when I was your age we got up in pitch dark,/and walked five miles to school and ten miles back,...Shoot, you've always had/hot food plopped in front of you, like magic./ For you, it's all ice cream and soda pop'') with his growing awareness of the pervasive racism and ignorance of his extended white family. The powerfully direct, anecdotal quality of these poems invites the reader to experience a deeply flawed world the poet has transformed into a more palatable place by his humor and compassion. Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.-Christine Stenstrom, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Library Journal

These poems make up a childhood memoir as vivid, vital, raffish, affecting, and appalling as the most candid autobiography or novel about growing up might be. Hudgins' family was brutal but not cruel. His father hung him upside-down off the house roof to scrape and paint under the eaves, put him and his brother out of the car when they whined and drove off, slammed him against a wall when he dropped the dinner turkey once; but then, his father hung him head-up next time to get a dead dog out of a well, came back and picked the little boys up where he'd left them, and now that he's old and spending "whole days / watching the fucking all-news channel," Hudgins wishes his father had those wall-slamming rages again. Eros and Thanatos show up repeatedly as Hudgins recalls family deaths with their deep mysteries to children and learning about and then becoming possessed by sex with its mysteries, and familial love illuminates all, not to gloss it with sentiment but to justify and fortify life in its struggles against chaos, for order. A fourth fine book from one of America's most accessible, natural poets.

Ray Olson