52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
51. Unincorporated persons in the late Honda dynasty.
A much, much stronger collection than the last one I read, What narcissism means to me. Hoagland exults, almost, in the space where guilt and desire meet in middle age. He bayonets everything awful about modern life, clear-eyed. But his core obsession is pain:
it is the old intelligence of pain
that I admire:how it moves around inside of him like smoke;
how it knows exactly what to do with human beings
to stay inside of them forever.
(‘The story of the father’)
Or
I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret
(‘Personal’)
The final section turns elegiac, and ends on a wonderful poem, ‘Voyage’, in which he lights out with all his pain, his ‘marvelous punishment,’ and turns the hurting world somehow into something still hurting but good. Hoagland is a poet to celebrate; is three collections enough to justify a ‘Collected Poems’?
