72 pages / 5.50 x 8.50 inches / None
In Glory River, David Huddle's poems pit precise observation, extravagant language, and humor against despair in an attempt to find a way to live in a new century in which the values of the past are dissolving and those of the future are frightening. Huddle opens with a sequence of exceptional tales about an imaginary hamlet in the mountains of Virginia. The residents of Glory River are rough, crude, and full of fight, but eager to tell their stories, "to explain how / in that place they had become the people / they were." Huddle also includes a series of poems exploring modern life, touching upon subjects as diverse as memory, family, art, politics, and pain. Accessible and often humorous, the poems in Glory River range from the strange and extraordinary happenings in the fantastical Virginia town to the painful, hopeful, and no less magical situations that can occur in real lives.
from "1970"
. . . the way I see it now
is that I, David R. Huddle,your basic twenty-eight-year-old,
moderately stoned, white,
liberal grad student, satright at the focal point at the exact
moment when the nation
made its final turn away from loveand generosity and toward greed,
hatred of the poor, bullying
the rest of the world, and pillagingwhat's left of paradise.
David Huddle teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English and the Rainier Writing Workshop. He is the author of over twenty novels, short-story collections, and volumes of poetry. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in the American Scholar, Esquire, Harper’s, the New Yorker, Poetry, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. His recent books include Dream Sender, a poetry collection, and My Immaculate Assassin, a novel.
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