Sweet Ruin (Brittingham Prize in Poetry)

Rating:
Summary: "And capable of saying anything"
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: As Good As It Gets
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Pure Perfection
Review: Nothing I can say will do justice to this book. It is practically perfect. I wish I had found him sooner in life. I just caught him at a reading a couple weeks ago, and found his new poems a little more playful than Sweet Ruin, but equally brilliant. The other reviewers are right. This book is hard to find because no one wants to give it up. If you take poetry seriously, you can't afford not to indulge in Hoagland's brilliance. I don't want to break his work down line by line and get pedagogical. Every line is so good, I wouldn't know which ones to pick for discussion. Steal this book if you have to.

Rating:
Summary: You will refuse to loan this book even to your best friend.
Review: 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.