Andrew Hudgins - A Soldier on the Marsh

I'll be honest.  This is an exhausting book.  There are no easy poems and Hudgins likes to lull the reader in with that old Southern boy trick that sweetly begs one to underestimate him -- common sounding words and plain speak -- then he sparks the trap and I find myself shaken and searching the poem to see how he did it again.

In A Soldier on the Marsh, one of five Marsh poems that anchor the book (Child on the Marsh, Soldier on the Marsh, Husband on the Marsh, Father on the Marsh and finally Christian on the Marsh)  Hudgins imagines Lanier, the soldier on leave, returning to the marsh of his childhood.

The marsh is no longer a place of wonder and bounty; now it is a place of flames, storms, blood. It seems wholly unhappy to have Lanier back.  I think Hudgins uses the colors red and green to symbolize the battle for Lanier's soul between the marsh (green) and the war (red).

Now, even blue is the color of  blood:

          Blue as blood hidden in the body,
          storm winds tore at oak leaves, which raged
          like green birds limed to whipping limbs,

Lanier sits in the marsh while the storm hurls leaves, acorns, and tree limbs at him.  As you might expect, he strips off his clothes and begins to play the flute. 

In the third strophe, it is sunset and the entire post-storm marsh seems consumed in the color red.  Lanier, naked and pale, is touched by this flame and becomes a flame himself:  a will-o'-the-wisp.  From the red on red on red landscape of the marsh at sunset, Lanier glows hot white.

The battle crescendos as Lanier makes his way home from the marsh.  The fields are on fire; a farmer is burning off his land:

         But where a dozen fires converged
         I found a bright green tulip tree.

Lanier watches as the tulip tree's leaves catch fire like torches, then inside:

         the green wood, hot sap chortled, sang
         until the branches blew apart
         like overheated cannon. The tree
         was opening itself to fire.

I have trouble here not just quoting the entire last part.  Basically, the tree explodes into the darkness and its embers burn like a "sprawled constellation" before burning out and giving way to the true stars and a song of a bobwhite (quail) singing "its stupid, cheerful name".

What does this mean?  Pretty simply, I think that Hudgins is saying that Lanier has survived the war but that a vital part of him has died.  Life will continue; but it has been irrevocably changed.

Andrew Hudgins - After the Wilderness: May 3, 1863

Since these poems are arranged in sequence, I'm having a difficult time choosing which poems to skip over.  So, my simple solution for now is not to skip.  After the Wilderness is the third poem in the book.  Maybe someone with better technical chops can help me out here; I think this is written in blank verse - iambic pentameter without rhyme.  I think I misidentified Child on the Marsh as blank verse.  After some research, I think it is actually free verse -- verse that does not follow a fixed metrical pattern.  Maybe some blank verse is also free verse? 

As I wade further into this book,  I begin to imagine Hudgins imagining himself inside of Lanier.  The Andrew Hudgins who is a son of the South, the son of a career military man, the Vietnam deferred college student.  Why did Hudgins choose Lanier as his vessel?  What does Hudgins have to say about the South, his father, his own choices in life?  It is interesting that Hudgins chose Lanier, who was both solider and poet.

According to Wikipedia, May 3, 1863 was the second bloodiest day of the American Civil War.  Although outnumbered more than 2:1, the Confederate Army, led by General Lee, fought to victory.  However, in so doing, they suffered an enormous casualty rate of 22%, lost one of their best generals to friendly fire and never recovered.

In After the Wilderness, Hudgins uses Lanier's brother Clifford's psychotic break to portray the sheer horror of the battle.  Just as in the preceding poem, Hudgins attacks the unnameable indirectly -- choosing an intimate if bizarre moment after the fighting is over. 

Lanier cannot find his brother and begins to search for him among the "fields of dead".  As he searches, he keeps tripping over men who are still alive and carries them to help or until they die on his back.  He spends the entire day and night peering into the faces of the corpses while imagining:

          the letter I would have to send our father,  
          saying Clifford was lost and I had lost him.

And I think it is significant that Hudgins is half way through his fourth page of poetry and his third poem before he pauses for his first strophe break here before continuing:

          I found him bent above a dying squirrel  
          while trying to revive the little thing.  

What a startlingly bizarre and effective image.  This is, I think, one of the first parts where I say to myself, "Well hello, Andrew"  I can feel him pushing through now, pressing up against this story. 

Hudgins continues his soldier as animal trope comparing Clifford to a "startled cat" and a "skittery mare".  When finally Lanier calms Clifford to a point, he helps Clifford kill and then bury all of the squirrels that had been left wounded on the battlefield. 

          We didn’t bury them all at once, with lime,
          the way they do on burial detail,
          but scooped a dozen, tiny, separate graves.
          When we were done he fell across the graves
          and sobbed as though they’d been his unborn sons.
          His chest was large — it covered most of them.  

So, the Lanier brothers show more respect and reverence for the burial of dead squirrels than of their own comrades.  In context, this isn't hard to understand as they and their comrades have sacrificed their humanity many days before.

After the burial, Lanier hugs and comforts his brother only to find that his brother has wet himself.

The image of two brothers carefully burying dead squirrels while surrounded by fields of dead soldiers will stay with me a long time.  I especially admire Hudgins method of working the fringes of the battlefield instead of throwing himself into the fray.  I find an element of respect in it.  Also, when one considers that Hudgins is attacking his own story tangentially through Lanier's; it starts to come together.

Andrew Hudgins - At Chancellorsville: The Battle of the Wilderness

This poem follows directly after Child on the Marsh.  Just the page prior, Lanier was a child caught in the sucking embrace of his mother and the earth.  Now he is caught in the suck of the earth as wilderness battlefield.  The comfort of his mother's breast is replaced by the encouragement of his brother, Clifford, to steal the fresh blue shirt off the dead body of a Union soldier.

Hudgins begins:

          He was an Indiana corporal

          shot in the thigh when their line broke

          in animal disarray...

Consider how much Hudgins accomplishes in these three short lines:
- Lanier is now in battle against a Union enemy
- The Union is losing this battle
- The soldier was shot in the thigh; setting up the coming temptation of the clean blue shirt
- The animals in this poem are not the catfish, snakes, and bees of the marsh; now the animals are men.

Lanier's own shirt is disintegrating on his body.  He has been at this a while.  Lanier curses his brother's attempts to persuade him to take the shirt.  He imagines:

          the slack flesh shifting underneath
          my hands, the other-person stink
          of that man's shirt, so newly his,

Even so, Lanier decides to go back for the shirt only to find that someone else has already beat them to it,

          So I had compromised my soul
          for nothing I would want to use -

Obviously, this is a critical moment in Lanier's life as Hudgins imagines it.  He will come out of this war carrying profound changes.  What I like about what Hudgins has done is he chooses a small, quiet moment on the battlefield -- not an explosion, an amputation, or a moment of stark violence. 

Hudgins ends:

          By autumn, we wore so much blue
          we could have passed for New York infantry.

Andrew Hudgins - A Child on the Marsh

Since this book follows the arc of Sidney Lanier's life, I thought it best to begin at the beginning.  The first poem is titled "Child on the Marsh" and is approximately 2.5 pages of blank verse.  There are no strophe breaks.  Hudgins ends with a rhymed couplet.  Basically, Hudgins does what he wants because he's that good. 

Hudgins uses the marsh to introduce Lanier, his mother, his father and the impending war.

He begins:

"I worked the river's slick banks, grabbling
in mud holes underneath tree roots."

Grabbling is the practice of using ones hand as both lure and rod in the hopes that a male catfish guarding its eggs will attack the hand so one can pull it from the river.  It is also a great example of how Hudgins picks common words and scenes and then grabbles the art from them.

The poem follows Lanier, the boy, through a day of fishing the marsh.  He winds up getting lost and when he finally finds his way home, his mother whips him rather half-heartedly before crying in relief and embracing him.

In my favorite part, Lanier remembers the time his father brought home a mudcat that he caught while fishing, drunk, before dawn.  Hudgins manages to capture the point of view of the child that sees an element of magic in everything.
   
                         "...But father laughed
and hugged me hard, pressing my head
against his coat, which stank, and glittered
where dried scales caught the light, For breakfast
he fried enormous chunks of fish,
the whole house glorious for days
with their rich stink.  One scale stuck to my face,
and as we ate he blinked, until
he understood what made me glitter.
He laughed, reached over, flicked the star
off of my face."

One thing that struck me was the irregular line lengths Hudgins uses.  I find myself worrying that irregular line lengths will imbalance a poem, but that is never an issue here.  (Note to self: figure out how to do that...)

Hudgins ends with a gorgeous connection between his relationship with the marsh and his mother. 

"And even as a child, I heard,
inside her sobs and chuckling,
the lovely sucking sounds of earth
that followed me, gasped, called my name
as I stomped through the mud, wrenched free
and heard the earth's voice under me."


This poem establishes Lanier as a sensitive soul; connected to the earth, nature, his parents.  I know that the war will wrench him away but I don't know how.  This creates a tension that pushes the reader forward. 

Andrew Hudgins, After the Lost War: A Narrative

Up to this point, I've only read one or two poems by Andrew Hudgins.  I had this book on order when FB raised the idea of NaPoReMo because I kept running into his name in one place or the other; plus, I was impressed that he was able to pull off the line, "blah, blah, blah" in the poem Day Job and Night Job which is just the sort of silly thing that catches my interest.

After the Lost War: A Narrative is a sequence of poems based on the life of the Georgia-born poet and musician Sidney Lanier.  The Lost War is the American Civil War as viewed from the perspective of the South.  Hudgins breaks up the book into four sections and prefaces each section of poems with roughly a half-page of historical background related to that particular section of Lanier's life.  From these historical sketches, Hudgins imagines himself in the life of Lanier.

The first section is titled The Macon Volunteers.  Lanier fought with the Macon Volunteers at the battle of Chancellorsville and other smaller battles and was later captured and taken prisoner.  He was confined for three months under extremely brutal conditions and his health deteriorated to the point that he remained a semi-invalid for the rest of his life. 

After the war ended, Lanier was released and staggered home from Maryland to Georgia.  Eventually, he proposed to a woman and was rejected then proposed and married another woman whom he met through a mutual friend.   Lanier also plays the flute, if that should turn out to be of some importance.

After the Lost War: A Narrative received the Poetry Prize.

This isn't the type of poetry that I would typically seek out on my own so I'm excited to get started.