Imperfect Geographies: New and Selected Poems

This eighth of Hogan's poetry volumes encompasses his beautifully-crafted responses to places as far afield as Rhode Island and California, the American Midwest, Southwest and Mexico; traveling through time to offer persona poems such as "Hair Broker, 1861" and "In the Garden of Leon Trotsky." As Sam Hamill wrote in the American Poetry Review, Hogan undertakes each poem as if undertaking "the possibility of radical transformation", and gripping examples are here, in his own journies through emotional landscapes. "I wanted you to escape the cold silences/ expect little from stiff affections.../ But even in small doses/ the mad Irish hurt you out of poetry,"Hogan writes in an elegy titled "Dear One", poignantly interwoven with the music of the Mexican song "Querida". For readers who've traveled with Hogan's poetry before, taken joy in his compassion and calm skill as a poet-guide, part of the new delight of IMPERFECT GEOGRAPHIES will be his exquisite mapping of language and light "sin fronteras" (without barriers), as in his "On Translating a Mexican Poet". "...Outside the hummingbird blinks/ among blossoming jasmine/ to leap a stucco wall/ sparkling (from broken glass)/ in the always vertical sun/ below Cancer. Cerrada.// North, ice is a silver ornament/ intricate as quartz./ In fair weather Windex gleam and slant rays/ panicked wrens/ to break their necks on. Closed.,"one of poetry's loveliest answers ever, to "bilingual" buzz.And throughout IMPERFECT GEOGRAPHIES, Hogan writes his ever-humble cartography for human frailty-become-strength. From "Winter Solstice": "...so that when we sometimes feel/ little or mean or ugly/ a reservoir is there./ And how the soul is no fiction:/ there is a celestial chaperon/ who leads us if we let her/ to enchanted places;/ that the same breath/ which allows us to disfigure our lives/ can metabolize joy."