Glory River

Glory River - Cover

Poems

by David Huddle

Southern Messenger Poets

72 pages / 5.50 x 8.50 inches / None

Poetry

Hardcover / 9780807133064 / April 2008
Paperback / 9780807133071 / April 2008

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, sat

right at the focal point at the exact 
moment when the nation 
made its final turn away from love

and generosity and toward greed, 
hatred of the poor, bullying 
the rest of the world, and pillaging

what'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.

Found an Error? Tell us about it.

×