Book Report: Tony Hoagland's latest

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
                                     are covered with blood--
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
                                                                      Signed, America

This is from an otherwise mediocre poem called "Hard Rain," which is the title poem from Tony Hoagland's new chapbook. I'm always about to be done with Hoagland. I loved his second book, Donkey Gospel, when I was in college. His third book, What Narcissism Means to Me, was also quite good. But he'd always lacked form and discipline on the page. He seemed to be one of those poets more interested in content and subject matter than craft and style. But in this chapbook he's starting to show new life. He uses stanzas in most of the poems and dropped lines in several. This was starting to happen in Narcissism, and I'm glad to see it's continuing.

As for the content, he's typically smarmy a bit too often. There's a self-righteous sarcasm to his work. But he's also spot-on in several poems, where he writes with both sincerity and passion. Many of the poems, like the one quoted above, take on America. He's disgusted with America. The war, materialism, commercialism, all the usual stuff poets are pissed off about. And that's one challenge: how do you find new and interesting ways to comment on the stupidity of malls? He's working on it.

He's also still exploring women and sex (not that one ever really completes this exploration). There's a good poem about watching the strap on the little black dress of a party hostess slide down all night, and watching her fix it, then realizing that it's supposed to fall like that, that it's all part of the in-betweeness that also symbolizes a party. Then there's a clever poem called "Responsibility in Metaphor," in which he plays with a metaphor for how a woman was looking at him, and the metaphor slowly slips away. It's hard to describe. Check out the chapbook, it's inexpensive.