Product Description

Tony Hoagland captures the recognizably American landscape of a man of his generation:  sex, friendship, rock and roll, cars, high optimism, and disillusion.  With what Robert Pinsky has called “the saving vulgarity of American poetry,”  Hoagland’s small biographies of destruction reveal that defeat is a natural prelude to grace and loss a kind of threshold to freedom.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44358 in Books
• Published on: 1993-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Review
All Along The Watchtower
Astrology
Carnal Knowledge
A Change In Plans
The Collaboration
The Delay
Doing This
A Dowry
Ducks
Emigration
Geography
History Of Desire
In Gratitude Of Talk
In The Land Of Lotus Eaters
A Love Of Learning
Men And Women
My Country
Oh Mercy
One Season
Paradise
Perpetual Motion
Poem For Men Only
Properly
Proud
The Question
Safeway
Second Nature
Smoke
Sweet Ruin
Threshold
Travellers
Two Shades Of Orange
Volunteer
The Word
You're The Top
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Review
“A remarkable book.  Without any rhetorical straining, with a disarming witty directness, these poems manage to transform every subject they touch, from love to politics, reaching out from the local and the personal to place the largest issues in the context of feeling.  It’s hard to think of a recent book that succeeds with equal grace in fusing the truth-telling and the lyric impulse, clarity and song, in a way that produces such consistent pleasure and surprise.”—Carl Dennis



“This is wonderful poetry:  exuberant, self-assured, instinct with wisdom and passion.”—Carolyn Kizer



“There is a fine strong sense in these poems of real lives being lived in a real world.  This is something I greatly prize.  And it is all colored, sometimes brightly, by the poet’s own highly romantic vision of things, so that what we may think we already know ends up seeming rich and strange.”—Donald Justice

About the Author
Tony Hoagland has published three chapbooks of poetry—History of Desire, A Change in Plans, and In Gratitude for Talk—and contributed to the anthologies  New American Poets of the 90’s, The Best of Crazyhorse, and The Pushcart Anthology 1991.  He now lives in Waterville, Maine.

Customer Reviews

You will refuse to loan this book even to your best friend.
Tony Hoagland's poems are accessible. There is nothing arcane to decipher unwillingly, no unnatural stretch for depth. The depth is there already. This is the poetry that I grew to love, when I first began reading contemporary poets back in the 70's. Robert Pinsky, Alan Dugan, Robert Bly, A.R.Ammons and others were on my shelf long before Tony Hoagland had published. And I think Hoagland's poems owe something to those writers. But his take on the art is his own and it is by far the more colloquial. The image is instant, the emotion is shared completely, the words make tangible record in the reader's mind. And the effect often is startling. My favorite poem in the book is called 'Safeway.' I read this poem in an issue of Ploughshares some years ago and thought it so wonderful that I subscribed to that pushcart, only later to find that not all its material affects me as that one poem does and always will. When I purchased 'Sweet Ruin' I expected to find at least a few poems not to my liking. But mirabile dictu! Every poem is as striking and enjoyable as 'Safeway.' Polished without seeming to have been, sounding as though they were written on bar napkins and never revised, glib and facile and beautifully inspired, 'Sweet Ruin' is one of those books you will reread ad infinitum, never knowing when you're finished.

As Good As It Gets
I paid [dollar amount] sight and unseen based on the author's appearance in a recent APR volume. It arrived as a slim tradepaper volume and my first thought was, 'I paid [dollar amount] for this?' After reading the first poem I realized how thoughtless I was and wished, oh how I wished, I had a hardcover version. Halfway through the book I put it away because I wanted to save the rest of the poems. They are too good to read all at once, but it's so easy to do. These are such an insight, the mind recalling all those spaces in a life, some painful and some funny, but all told in a carefully chosen syntax that doesn't misplace a single word.

"And capable of saying anything"
From the beginning of poetry, from the beginnings of Greek and Roman poems, poetry has striven to be both dulce et utile---pleasant and useful. Tony Hoagland is a poet who captures both of those aspects of poetry, and effortlessly so. Not a single word goes to waste, as he describes situations familiar to almost any audience, while making them sound extraordinary and worth reading about. The wishes of mankind are encapsulated in this poetry: "I should walk up the stairs right now/ and make slow love to the woman I live with." These are poems which are provoking and well-thought out, to the point of being accessible: "It wasn't easy, inventing the wheel..."
Reading Hoagland's poetry, a sense of life is gained, while in his poetry, life moves on: observed, undisturbed, and intact for the next reader.