The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood

by Andrew Hudgins

The Glass Hammer, the fourth book of poems by the celebrated author of After the Lost War, is a southern narrative poem. It tells the story of a boy brought up in a military family in Texas and Alabama, and it is as rich in emotion and experience as any novel, as family life itself. In a sequence of sixty-five short lyrics, the narrator moves from the anecdotal circumstances of his infancy to the rebellions of his youth and adolescence, from the tragedy of his mother's death to the acceptance of his father's disciplinary love. This sequence of poems is human, solid, passionate, rueful, and eminently readable. It is as transparent as a mountain brook and moves as fast. It is as painful and powerful and surprising as first love and first loss.

Genres: Poetry

97 pages, Paperback

First published June 22, 1994

About the author

ANDREW HUDGINS is the author of seven books of poems, including Saints and Strangers, The Glass Hammer, and most recently Ecstatic in the Poison. A finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, he is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Harper Lee Award. He currently teaches in the Department of English at Ohio State University.

Reviews

[Sherry Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Glass Hammer is the reason I write poetry instead of short fiction. Having had a classical liberal arts education, majoring in English, with all canons in place, I thought poetry could only be written by "POETS" to express deep thoughts about love, death, and religious ecstasy (see "Paradise Lost."). Men poets. Then in 1989, I was awarded a small grant from the Kentucky Arts Counsel that I used to go to the Indiana University Writer's Workshop -- to study short story.

I can't say that I learned a lot about the writing of short stories there, but, when I went to Andrew Hudgins' reading of The Glass Hammer I experienced something akin to a conversion experience. By the time he got to "Funeral Parlor Fan," in which he describes every mid-July revival meeting I ever squirmed and fidgeted through, I knew he was writing about my life too. And if he could do it, hilariously and compassionately, in language that sang, then maybe I could too.

The rest is history -- obscure history, but history.

Inside the Vineyard Baptist Church,
the funeral parlor fans -- tick, tock --
snapped the hot air in the faces of
grandmother, mother, aunt. They kept
a steady out-of-sequence beat.
They never faltered.

[Julie Bennett · Rating 3 out of 5]

some of these poems were deeply moving, some others came off as a bit … self righteous? Not really sure the right word.

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hudgins interrupts the narrative in the poem “Burial Insurance” with the line, “I’ll gloss this story with another story” (93), and this could be a metonymic statement that stands for his technique in all the poems collected here. In his examination of childhood, particularly the way the past relates to the present, Hudgins interweaves imagistic stories from his past and present to discern how he became a poet amidst a lower class upbringing filled with racism, poverty, lack of education and abuse. Although this is a unique perspective, I found most of these poems could have been short prose essays about his childhood. The pieces that work best happen when Hudgins allows the narrative to become a metaphor that he dissects, such as in “Skeeter Kites,” in which the children in the poem construct make-shift kites to fly during an uncle’s funeral, which stand for the way the deceased has “broken free” of his family (39). He also succeeds better when he allows himself to pontificate on his experiences, instead of just reporting them, as exemplified by the line about his grandmother which comments on her “love so close to hate/it’s taken decades just to say there’s a difference” (46). Hudgins ends the book by coming to peace with the “dirt” (97) his family has so much of, and it is a transformational moment for him personally. It would have been better had he shared that experience more with the reader.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book of American poetry. It reminded me of my childhood.

[Ivy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful language and captivating imagery!

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like all of Andrew Hudgins's poetry collections, this one is beautifully written and poignant.