Donkey Gospel: Poems

Donkey Gospel, the first book I encountered by Tony Hoagland, is very easily one of the best books of poetry I've ever seen. All of his poems are taut with lyrical courage, tempered with great risk, and resplendent with what I like to call a refreshing, emotional honesty. Hoagland seems on every page to be both ferocious and vulnerable in a manner that is sadly lacking in much of today's elitist verse. In "Donkey Gospel", Hoagland overwhelmingly disproves the thesis of so many other poets--that good poetry must be accessible only to an uber-educated handful. Here, we see poems whose accessibility, lyricism, and good humor are matched only by their brilliance. As a frequent reader of poetry books, I am often disappointed by what strikes me as the work of tone-deaf snobs who instill no real compassion in their work. Not the case with Hoagland. I literally dog-eared nearly every page of Donkey Gospel, and I happily share his stuff with my creative writing students. The looks on their faces says it all.

The previous review doesn't make any sense to me. I too saw Hoagland read in Pittsburgh, have seen him read a couple of times actually, and I have always been impressed by the great energy, sensitivity, and the sheet amount of and depth of references he brings into each poem. His poems make me glad to be alive, to be honest. I would guess that the listener who thinks Hoagland has "no ear" might, as a wise man once said, look to the mote in his own perceptions. Maybe he or she expected something different from poetry. Hoagland's poems are not in the high lyrical mode of, say, Edna St. Vincent Millay, but that's not what they're about, what they're interested in. They are about conversation, argument, working out of ideas and sensibilities. Having said that, they are also musical--just not at the expense of meaningfulness. And, as for Hoagland having too high a regard for himself, one only has to actually pay attention to the actual poems to see that they are in fact full of humility and a deep (wonderful, brilliant, exuberant, humane) sensitivity.

If you haven't, you should order a copy of Donkey Gospel by Tony Hoagland. Sweet Ruin is now out of print and offered only as a black and white reprint. Sweet Ruin won the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and Donkey Gospel the 1997 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of Poets. Both are slim volumes of poetry by a poet who displays a disarming conversational tone that rises to the ear from each line, studied and punctual. I admire meaning before the lyrical, and brevity, while not absolutely necessary, is something that when well done, can be striking. Vignettes would best describe these poems, if you could also include the epiphany of sudden revelation as part of the definition, along with the act of confession, except that the priest is talking to you before you confess, revealing all those things that you knew were just human failings, things that would make you stronger once dressed into daylight for examination. And Tony Hoagland does that to you in a wonderful tone of voice, as if you were an old friend talking to him on your back porch.Two things that would make him dear to you are his lack of sentiment and his ability to leave a conversation open-ended, something that did not have to be finished right now, maybe something that would never really have a finish, but would just remain as a careful thought you could go back to and examine in more detail when you had the time. One thing that will make him not so dear is perhaps the fact that there is nothing new in his poetry. The themes are all common. The people are all people that you know. Their emotional misdirection is your own along with all their false starts and stops. The only exception is that Tony Hoagland has taken all this apart, the people and the places, and studied each carefully before putting them back together. He has studied all the business of the ordinary person who stares back at us in the mirror wondering about all the business of their life that hangs in the reflection in small ungathered moments. These he presents as concise bits of pain with romantic underpinnings sometimes rising into view: natural in tone, as common discourse about common things, written as best one can possibly put down the spoken word in type; something to savor for when we have weighted ourselves, once again, too heavily with all that expectancy in the mirrored face.

There is a cleverness and effervescent attitude in Hoagland's poetry that softens his satirical voice into one that is friendly and inviting. If that were all, however, I would have considered this book to be merely another example of clever poetry that celebrates the observance of life's absurdities made palpable by a generous pinch of cultural irony. While poems of that genre have merit, they seldom engage me on an emotional level (I don't get choked-up over Ogden Nash). But that's where Tony Hoagland departs from what's expected and excels at it. It's difficult to pigeonhole him. His style approaches the burlesque, but is seldom caustic. His wit makes fun of others (e.g. "Here in Berkeley"), but always with a sense of pathos and self-inclusion. Hoagland requires little more from his readers than a willingness to suspend pretension, a state of mind he so pointedly deplores in the angriest poem of this collection, "Lawrence." But even there, after venting against self-proclaimed intellectuals "whose relationship to literature/is approximately that of a tree shredder/to stands of old-growth forest," Hoagland gently reminds us that everyone possesses the same paradoxical animal-spirit combination, and although we may stumble along our journey, seemingly stalled, we can still shine. This book is a magnificent distillation of the human condition. Hoagland's observations inspire us to a view of our own lives that is neither grand nor small, but the cumulative congruence of all human experience superimposed over that of our own. It is Hoagland's ability in recognizing this condition that demonstrates the depth of his poetic spirit. Within the confines of a single poem, he can engage the reader in a furious emotional mix, ranging from laughter to tears. I'm sure some critics will find his style countercultural or didactic, but Hoagland never muses from a higher perch than his reader, choosing instead to engage in the human folly as a participant rather than a teacher. This is a book of poetry you can read cover to cover and come back for more.

Read the poem "Benevolence" which is up above this review on the page. I admit, I'm sick to death of poems about men and their fathers, but this poem is so charmingly seductive--involving as it does the actual seduction of a large black lab, who is Hoagland's father reincarnated, by an ice cube dipped in single malt, that I am utterly willing to go along. The choice of animals so utterly conjures the man--affable, a little goofy, big, maybe a bit clumsy.then seat himself before me, trembling, expectant, water pouring down the long pink dangle of his tongue as the memory of pleasure from his former life shakes him like a tail. And that's only part of the pleasure of this poem. He's inventive without strain, describing men standing drinking beer, the cans 'dropping like booster rockets...'Hoagland has the strange magic of surrealism and reinvents the everyday world new again and again in his poems.