by John Hodgen
University of Pittsburgh Press 2006
Reviewed by Jason Bredle

Safe

John Hodgen’s Grace is a fine selection for the AWP Award Series—a collection of well-crafted meditations on life for the conservative democratic demographic from the perspective of a Massachusetts adjunct professor of English. In short, poems from an All-American poet, your next door neighbor, a guy content to sit back and describe the world as happens somewhere out there, occasionally missing his father and longing for youth, a guy who dislikes war and racism. Could you really expect that much? But I *like* racism, you may be thinking. Then this book isn’t for you.

But this book is for you if you long for a childhood passed, sometimes miss your father, or ever feel alone in this mixed up world of ours. In fact, Hodgen strikes me as the type of guy with whom I could sit down and chit chat about life and walk away feeling pretty okay, which makes the poems in Grace all the more frustrating. I want to like them, I want to walk away feeling pretty okay, but ultimately, I walk away feeling completely gray, wishing more stimulating things would happen to the guy so that he could write more stimulating poems. 

But he doesn’t, so we have to work with what he’s given us: grace. What constitutes the idea of grace according to Hodgen? The dedication to Grace Taylor aside, the book’s opener, “Clay County,” presents it as lonely, like a “slender roan horse” in a “buckwheat field,” or a single black girl talking to a young man on a motorcycle in her driveway. In “This Moon, These Fifty Years,” grace is also a lonely soul, this time in the form of the speaker’s father, who arrives home from work each night to the delight of his sons only to sit in his car for a few moments before walking into the house. Hodgen’s grace also serves as prayer, coming to us “wordless, like stones.” In fact, one commendable aspect of the book is its ability to address the spiritual without delving into the religious: “I have seen this today,” writes Hodgen in “On a Wing,” “my makeshift prayer: a man in a torn serape/ who pumped my gas and looked like my long-lost brother.” Here and elsewhere, common, every day images and situations take on an aura of graceful spirituality without leaving the realm of observation and meditation.

And the poems are delivered ever so gracefully, each moment captured and extrapolated with only the utmost care, from the effortless falling in “For the Leapers” to the “schoolchildren alighting from their yellow ships” in the unfortunately titled “The Oldest Lie,” a contemplation of the violence and senselessness of the slave trade and perhaps the most powerful and vivid poem in the book due to its realism, darkness, and ultimate beauty.

Yet too often Hodgen over-saturates his work with “the poetic,” especially with regard to  metaphors. In “For Freedy, and for the Ohio Dragging Itself Dead,” for instance, death is likened to “a riderless horse, the last clown in the car,/ the 8 a.m. barber reading his paper alone in his silver gray chair,/ Lincoln locked up in the dark each night at the Lincoln Wax Museum” all in one small stanza. Too often Hodgen panders to his demographic, relying heavily on quirky names to provide the detail of his poems, to get a broad chuckle from his like-minded audience, as in the “Klip N’ Dip” and “Pitchkettle Road” of “Clay County” or the “jalopies” in “Lost Bird.” (I even counted two non-ironic uses of “jumpin’ jehosaphat”).  Occasionally, too, Hodgen takes the easy way out of a poem, going either for the evocation of his dead father, sitting in a “driveway up in heaven” or in the “tall grass in heaven,” or opting for a cute play on words, as with the supermarket cans of Goya in “Today.”

While one cannot question the care that went into these poems, one can’t help but feel unchallenged by the subject matter. Yes, Hispanics were undercounted in the census and that sucks; a Latin American man fell to his death attempting to enter the US from the wheel well of an airplane and that sucks even more; and thousands upon thousands of Africans were forced to drown and that’s just terrible, but so what? How does it affect the speaker? Well, he observes them, creates a broad generalization on the matter, then steps outside to mow the lawn before falling asleep in front of the television, most likely. His images are beautiful enough—but what now? Perhaps the challenge Hodgen had in mind was up to the readers, perhaps the challenge is to take these news clippings and think about their relationship to our daily lives, but if so, the challenge is garbled and lost amongst the metaphors and cute phrases, amongst the tragedy that Hodgen observes in the death of his friend’s daughter, the passing of his own father, the longing for his childhood—events that seem to only vaguely happen to the him as he floats gracefully through each day.

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