Babylon in a Jar: Poems

by Andrew Hudgins

The poems in Babylon in a Jar extend the forceful explorations that Andrew Hudgins began with Saints and Strangers , his first book and a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. Since then, he has probed the nature of Southern experience, the conflict between religion and worldliness, the origins of poetry, the exaltations and perils of family. In this volume he brings such issues down to the old conflict between order and disorder. He responds with passion to the natural world, to history, to "before he flooded the rubble, he swept up the dust of Babylon / to give as presents, and he stored it in a jar." The breadth and sweep of these poems, their variety and fervor, surpass Hudgins's previous work in After the Lost War (winner of the Poets' Prize), The Never-Ending (a runner-up for the National Book Award), and The Glass Hammer .

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published April 25, 2001

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

[mwpm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blunt daffodil spikes
- Babylon and Nineveh -
split frozen earth. They're yellow,
the coarse dead yellow
they died back to
last summer, leaf tips
returning as pale flames:
unburied candelabra, a dead
queen rising from below,
led by a cold torch.
Sparta, Athens, Rome.
Mecca and Medina. From underneath,
blades bayonet the ice-crazed
black crust, the blade tips
yellow, tinged with last
year's death and, already erect
- Beijing, Paris, Rome -
they green, they come alive.
Moscow, Berlin, Tokyo.
The murderous, back-
from-death preblossoming
blossoms, promising
the frilled afterthought
of flowers, bright cups
tipping in the March god's fist.
Jerusalem. Tyre and Sidon.
They are not cups. But watch
bees drink from their crimped lips.
Tenochtitlan and Sumer.
Frail blade, but see what it
destroys. Cold fire, but feel
the dead world's constant simmer.

- Poem, pg. 6

* * *

The jackdaw chatters late, the chaffinch pipes at dawn,
and in a week the market sets record highs
and record lows. The brown moth turns to gray.
The five-year plan enters its thirteenth year.
Visions grow more frequent among believers,
and bees swirl near the hive, guarding their stores
against an unseen foe, while vodka prices
inch downward and the cost of razor wire skyrockets.
Attacks on Jews and Jewish-owned businesses
increase in frequency and violence. A sudden
massing of elite troops on the border,
and the president preempts Saturday programming
and tells bored children his recurring dream,
bored because they too have dreamed repeatedly
of the steep roof, the book with unturnable pages.
And honeysuckle reeks of burning rubber.

- Signs of a Change in Weather, pg. 18

* * *

At dusk I crouch in greenery and watch the roses
go unplundered, the violets unravished. The chaste
white lily grows more virtuous than ever,
and everywhere I walk, the peonies,
perfumed lasciviously, soften past lush to blowsy, seducing
the bee that isn't there to be seduced
- a sad, unnatural absence in the garden -
the yellow dust untroubled on the stamen,
the pollen ungathered, the seed unmade,
the fruit unformed and therefore never swollen,
not green, not ripe, not plucked and eaten.

Oh, I could stoop over lilies, dabbing
stamen to stigma, anther to pistil, and I do -
a human bumbler in the void,
the swaying limbs and bobbing flowerheads
abuzz with nothing, no ardent bodies
squirming and rooting in the bloom,
ransacking nectar, draped with pollen
like yellow pantaloons, like golden saddlebags.

Each blossom's Rome no longer, for what is Rome
when she has thrown the city gates wide open
and no one enters, and Babylon when she
has pulled down all her seven walls and no one takes her?
And Nineveh, what is she, and what is Egypt
when no one comes to loot the golden dust
with which each empire turns into the next?

- Elegy for the Bees, pg. 27

[Yusuf Ahmed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gender? Bad, for the most part. We really fucked that one up. BUT reading something and knowing, intuitively, that it was written by a man? Rocks, pinnacle of literature.
Anyways, this was male poetry in the truest sense. History, religion, historical religion, suburban theology. All through the male lens. 3 stars boils down to personal preference, the poems were all mechanically sound.

[Amory Blaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems about nature, death, and divorce.

Several poems relied on blunt twists or shocking natural truths. "When the Weak Lamb Dies" (do farmers really stuff abandoned lambs into dead sheep skins??) and "Stump" (in which the author invisions himself as a chicken with its head chopped off)....Rain: "It's raining women here in Cincinnati. / Parts of women, parts of one woman? / The police aren't really sure. Last week / they found an arm, a leg, another arm....")

My favorite full poems tended to be the simplest and most narrative: like "Ashes," about literally and figuratively dropping the cremated remains of a friend's sister; "Keys," in which the author ricochets through moods while locked out of the house; and "Why Stop?" which details a drunken dance at a bar ("Why stop? / To start again when we're stronger").

I also love these lines from "Hail":

Breathe, / I tell myself.
Death / is it's own season, out
of sequence, lapping, overlapping

And "After Muscling Through Sharp Greenery" (about stumps again, one of Hudgins' favorite subjects):

And now I own
what I desire:
a hole,
a nothing I can fill with anything.
But for a long
time I will leave it empty
before I make it something and diminish it

And "In the Red Seats":

Five seats away,
from an adoring, pink,
intoxicated face,
love shimmered, love radiated
like equatorial sunshine,
the way a lover's face
illuminates the lover,
the loved, and the dark world
in one strange, lucent moment:
satisfied and thrilled, intense
and effortless - as God
regards us every moment.
I couldn't bear it. I left
in the fifth inning, sidling
down packed precipitous
red rows, easing past strangers,
excusing myself.

And the entire opening half of "Wind":

Wind shook the dead but not-yet-fallen leaves.
Wind tugged and plucked and rattled the dead leaves,
the wind entreating come and the oak leaves,
already dead, saying no to death, no,
for that was what the wind through brown leaves was - death -
and I was afraid: maple leaves called take me
and the wind took them, and I was fascinated
because it snatched and pulled at me and I said no.
I said no but I loved its hands on me,
loved its familiar and insistent touch...

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hudgins uses the musicality of language to back up the keen observations in his poetry; his phrasings make the reader pause, gasp, rush, and soar, depending on the effect he wants to create. The best use of sound I've heard in modern poetry recently. They're rich, and worshipful of the world around (these are, in some sense, religious poems--you can tell that Hudgins is deeply involved with his faith, though he's certainly not proselytizing).
The one thing that does bother me--though it didn't on just reading this book, it was a problem when I noted that this was true in almost all of his other work as well--is that all of Hudgins' poems end up wrapped up succinctly in an observation, a natural conclusion or conversion of some sort. He never (or rarely--not that I've found) allows a subject to refuse to resolve. Every poem doesn't deserve the same kind of ending; some things do not wrap up into neat little bundles. To put them into neat little bundles nevertheless is a facile use of the medium, trying to avoid actually dealing with the problem of the uncloseable.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hudgins has lots to say about his life--from his boyhood to adulthood, from the religious to the blasphemous. His images are strong, his words carefully chosen. Stand out poems include: When the Weak Lamb Dies, Ball, Plunge, Bodies of Water.

[nichole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was not bad, but not my cup of tea. I did not resonate with all of the poems, though there were a few I enjoyed.
my favorite poems were:
the daffodils erupt in clumps
we were simply talking
elegy for the bees
and
how to stop

[Annie Schoening · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uh, I don't normally read poetry, but this is lovely. I read it in college and never forgot his poems.