Though I have a loving and invigoratingly literal father, as a burgeoning poet I find that I am often in search of literary father–types. Robert Frost and W. H. Auden have become tetchy grandpas I beleaguer unabashedly; W. S. Merwin's that bow–tie uncle turned maverick bohemian as his Hawaiian waterfalls; Philip Levine's another uncle, bone–raw, the kind who knows the gritty secrets of both labor and beauty; and Li–Young Lee's the luminous brother–in–law who has serene lessons up his sleeves, like how to let a trapped bird out of the house. Galway Kinnell, bless him, is not just Fergus and Maud's dad—he's everyone's, bless us.

It's with a volume of poetry like John Hodgen's Grace that I realize this ends up happening whether I want it to or not—this patrilineage of poets (certainly not a woman academic's most cosmopolitan admission these days). What draws me in initially is a pronounced craftsmanship, one worth analysis and emulation; yet, as irresistible in another vein, I glean perspective and angle, I hear tone and voice, I glimpse the wild, calculated knack of making connections and meaning; the details tell me of something other than what I am myself, that is, a twenty–something female in the 21st century. Perhaps reading Hodgen's writing is a path to my own father, but it feels more universal. Since Shelly asserted that reading poetry was a way of putting yourself in another's place, can a young woman admit this—that certain poets teach her about the world and experience of a man?

The risk of such musing might be to assume that Hodgen's poetry is categorically paternal or masculine. It is not. His third and prize–winning volume, Grace, earning one of the nation's top awards from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, spends much time reflecting on youthful experiences from that great electric space, retrospection, but at the same time many poems carefully record the chasm between human beings, between what happens and what might have, between our behavior and our desire to behave. Confusion, consternation, and grief are not limited to lilting boyhood recollections. And, just as often, Hodgen's capricious sensibility of a scene, as in "My Mother Swimming," offers the uncrushable delight of being alive:

But there will be moments, she said, smiling, as she turned on her back,
floating, moments like diamonds in our hands, candles on the waves,
and we could make our way to them, hold them one by one,
like the silver beads of water on the head of a baby being baptized,
the breath she takes in like a dream and lets go.

This is the grace of Hodgen's poetry—moments which are more than we deserve but what we ache for our whole lives, moments which speak toward that greater grace; this poem and others are haunting, reminding somehow that it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God. Without being overtly religious, Hodgen's poetry often offers that sense of having been given an incredible gift, something overwhelming and mysteriously precious, never to be remunerated, never to be fully understood. At the same time, his poems convey a spiritual gravitas and a grappling of faith which seems, if not paraded, at least obstinately absorbing. In "Proof," a dying father's body displays "blood vessels that had burst into burgundy, / into hieroglyphics, the blotches like brushstrokes," which, to the narrator, speaks of "some artist's name, the way one would sign his masterpiece"—and becomes an inevitability even for those who go on living, "the proof remaining for all to see, God's autograph, / His certain seal, saying I made this, / this belongs to me."

Hodgen's poem "On a Wing" troubles the specifics of prayer—our tongue–tied efforts, its slippery comfort: "We do not come to prayers. Like sisters they come to us, / wordless, like stones, like the open–mouthed face on a sarcophagus." Yet he ends the poem with a list–like prayer for people, items, circumstances which the poem details, and, in a final rhyming couplet, "for the holes in this house, the wind that comes in and pays no rent, / for the heaven we do not go to, for the heaven that is sent." This lingering poignancy is as sincere as the crows in the poem who offer "their hope hope hope in the air," and though Hodgen pins an adjectival "pea–brained" on the crows, their sounds are, undeniably, reminiscent of the human heart's.

Here and elsewhere, Hodgen alludes to an abiding isolation that seems tethered to grace, as in the rendering of a landscape in the volume's first poem, "Clay County": "And just before the buckwheat field that opens lonely as grace, / the field with the massive tree in the middle, shattered by lightning, / a slender roan horse feeds under its basilica of broken branches, / because he knows that is the place / where the soft tufts of grass / taste the sweetest." In other poems, as at the end of the macabre "Eyes," this isolation becomes more desperate: "And you, what are you looking for right now, / straining, earnest, heroic, keen, / from your deep, impenetrable darkness?"

Loneliness and darkness are part–and–parcel of Hodgen's contemplation of the world, but, as though they are falling stars, his face still seems up–turned, his spirit unable to sink into the anguish that laces in and out of our lives. Indeed, he must be content to allow the theological implications of grace in this book, even as the title has particular, corporeal significance. As Hodgen isn't looking to make an announcement, it took some searching to find out about this volume's dedicatee: Grace Taylor is Hodgen's 3–year–old granddaughter. Perhaps, then, my immediate sense of Hodgen as a father–type was more than literary. In "Prenatal," a poem detailing the grim circumstance of Grace's four–months–premature birth, Hodgen offers his faltering ability to hold onto faith even as he holds the face of his daughter, "while some dumb angel locked up in the sacristy of my heart cries out, / nonetheless, proclaiming over and over the moving river of the night: Be still."

In fact, a section of the book is subtitled " … angels & ministers … "; these turn out to be the unlikely as well as the literal. Hodgen's grandfather was a minister, but it is the relationship with his father, severed when he was a high schooler, that appears repeatedly in this volume, as it did his first, In My Father's House. One of the most powerful poems in Grace, "This Moon, These Fifty Years," begins with a recollection of Hodgen and his brothers trying to stay awake for their father's return from second shift at the paper mill: "[we'd try] to hold the rope of that slow bucket being lowered to the well, / and we'd look down for him in the driveway / … like three small moons in the window." Though his father would often remain in the car to finish a cigarette once he arrived, the boys were "whispering our moonsong in the window, / he's here, he's here, he's here." A lesser poet would've ended the poem there, but the poem's strength lies in the fact that it blossoms into speculation about his father's thoughts in the car: Apache braves, Abe Lincoln, Ted Williams, Sputnik. This imaginative romp is indicative of that pulsing ache to know one's father—only for the poem to end with an adult Hodgen, whose father is perhaps "sitting now in a driveway up in heaven … / Sputnik blinking by … like a sleepy moon, like my life, / crying out, I am here, I am here, I am here."

This, too, is the grace of Hodgen's poetry, to let what is broken also be beautiful. And more, his readers are the recipients of Hodgen's life–scope: that winnowing view of memory that actually means a small everything to the here and now. The boy's voice summons the thousand lit–windows of the city of childhood—jujubes, Jumping Jehoshaphats, the spinning–plate man on the Ed Sullivan show. But even as you are reading a man's polished recollections, that's not only what it is: it is the process of understanding, it is the still–maturing comprehension of how, and who, and why. This is Hodgen's skill— recognizing the gift of grace even as we realize we couldn't yet have requested such a thing.

Susanna Childress is the author of Jagged Edge (Univ. of Wisconsin Press), winner of the Brittingham Prize for Poetry.

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