Slowly, with Job's long patience, she combed through my head, picking through each dark, separate strand, finding the lice and crushing them, one by one, beneath her fingernail. This narrative turn privileges fundamental human acts, suspicious of all the higher-order thinking which provoked war in the first place. This voice which finds love even at grave's edge does so unashamedly, without Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, or the other trappings of our century. A more recent poem displays Hudgins at his urgent best, demanding some accounting at the edges of language, action, and time. . . . I can't see it happen and wouldn't know except I trust Book, Book, the goddamn book, because I cannot see the hunting.
Book insists on purpose.
Not even blood sport. Watching the flesh and blood Hudgins rock your porch chairs into an infinity of shrubbery, spilling fine bourbon among the ferns, you discover this man who derives blessedness and joy from words and deeds done together. As Howard Nemerov is the last, great celebrant of word and thing in twentieth-century American poetry, so Andrew Hudgins may be the last, best celebrant of word and act here at century's close.