Grace

by John Hodgen

Grace is John Hodgen’s third book of poetry. He is a poet of extreme contrasts, offering us the dregs of despair, yet instantly recalling hope in the beauty of nature or in a moment in time when all is right, when we realize grace. In “For the Leapers” the narrator relates, “We will fall past the angels, / we will fall from such height, / our tears will lift up from our eyes. / We will fall straight through hell. / And then we will rise.” Hodgen’s poems roam through history, religion, man-made disasters, baseball, pop culture, and Wal-Marts, on paths that come full circle with remarkable completeness, maturity, and dexterity.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yes, very graceful. Careful, in the many senses of the word.

I took along to read on XOBA, so I biked in rural Ohio by day and read about it by night. (Well, sometimes the images were Ohioan, sometimes more generally rural, sometimes specifically the pain of family and the distances therein.)