Hudgins manages to do a number of things that, these days, seem nearly impossible: breaks the rules of both free-verse and metric poetry, complete an epic-length series (144 pages) of related poems and keep them readable, and manage the whole way not to drop a single syllable, not include a single throwaway word. Hudgins, in these poems, is so completely attuned to the beauty of the language he's using and the natural flow of the words that the anomalies within them take on, at best, minimal significance. Hudgins does both of these things, seemingly at will, and even the most astute reader will likely skim right by them without even noticing there's been a rhyme, or a break in the rhythm. Before free verse became so popular, it was also not advisable to write in, say, iambic tetrameter and then suddenly throw in a line of iambic pentameter. Nonrhyming poetry that rhymes every once in a while is one of the great no-nos of poetry it speaks to a lack of attention paid to the details of craft. The entire book is in blank verse, but a sort of sprung blank verse (through not as loose as the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins) that rhymes every once in a while. The greatness of the work here is in the construction of the poetry itself. Hudgins based this series of poems loosely on the life of Civil War veteran, novelist, and flautist Sidney Lanier, but really, the subject matter could have been anything from primordial ooze to particle physics. Houghton Mifflin bought centuries off the time they will spend in purgatory for all those dry-as-dust textbooks with this collection.

I read Hudgins' collection The Never-Ending a few months back, and after I had finished praising it, a friend of mine told me that I had to read After the Lost War as soon as possible. Andrew Hudgins, After the Lost War: A Narrative (Houghton Mifflin, 1988)

After The Lost War by Andrew Hudgins