Beasts, River, Drunk Men, Garden, Burst, & Light - Sequences & Long Poems

Poetry. I had the privilege of interviewing Richard Hague not so many years ago about poetry and teaching and this, among the many things we discussed, will always remain with me: as far back as his college years he knew that his job 'was not to become a poet that sounded the same at 60 as he had at 20 and whose subject matters remained the same at 60 as they were at 20. Given the variety of life, and given the variety of things that are interesting and things that poetry can be made from, why the hell would you want to limit yourself to one sort of specialized niche that is all yours? Poetry is vast. It's large. You follow Whitman's 'I am large, I contain multitudes.' And so, too, are these poems massive and multifarious in how and what they approach, but seen always through Dick Hague's exacting eye for the specific and strange. His whole universe of poetry is 'a kind of resonance and harmony' where '[e]ven language folds into itself / in odd places' and we, his readers, are grateful that it is so.-Pauletta Hansel