Saints and Strangers

Andrew Hudgins

Saints and Strangers may be the single best debut book of poetry I have ever read. Hudgins, who has since gone on to what amounts to true fame in the poetry world (read: having published a piece of prose in the Poets on Poetry series of books), had obvious talent from the get-go, and subsequent releases have shown that this wasn't a fluke, which makes it all the more wonderful. He has a natural flair for word choice, an excellent grasp of image, and mostly gets the line breaks right. A representative sample from the eight-poem-long title piece:

"...They punched him down, took turns kicking his ribs,
while thirty old women and sixteen men
sat slack-jawed in their folding chairs and watched.
Just twelve, not knowing what to do, I launched
int "Amazing Grace"-- the only hymn
I knew by heart-- and everybody sang.
We sang until the hunters grew ashamed
-- or tired-- and left, taking their guns,
their faces red and gleaming from the work...."
("At the Piano")

Yes, Hudgins' work is probably not something to read while entertaining thoughts of slitting one's wrists.

He only gets it really, hilariously wrong once:

"In Northern Germany the bogs dispense
the modern bodies of prehistoric men,
the corpses lugubriously bobbing up
like a fragile, slow, insistent dream..."
("The Bog of the Fathers")

"Lugubriously" is not a word that should have ever been used in a poem, and the good cod willin' and the cricks don't rise, it never will be again.

Still, despite that and a minimum of line break problems, Saints and Strangers is an awe-inspiring piece of work. Poetry lovers and non-poetry lovers alike, this one's for you.