Soon After Rain

By James Hoggard

James Hoggard’s new collection of poems is an elegant, highly energetic volume that takes its readers through a wealth of settings, times, and forms. As versatile a poet as there is, Hoggard time and again turns his attention to forms like pantoum and ghazals that heighten the readers’ responses to the stories he tells in verse. In fact, one of the signal pieces in the volume shows Hoggard unearthing an old story about Odysseus’ trying through a wealth of trickery to get out of going to the Trojan War. What the tale adds up to, however, is a deeply moving love story that seems genuinely contemporary. Running throughout this collection is a powerful use of environmental collapse as both theme and metaphor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781609404291

Book preview

Author

I.

Soon After Rain

Soon after rain has stopped, a silence comes

when no bird sings and no wind stirs.

The world seems briefly mute

and sweet attention’s everywhere.

When no bird sings and no wind stirs

the world itself seems to have hushed,

and sweet attention’s everywhere:

no circling ripples stir the pond.

The world itself seems to have hushed:

traffics of sound have disappeared,

no circling ripples stir the pond,

the turtles staying still on rocks.

Traffics of sound have disappeared,

a sense of absence everywhere:

the turtles staying still on rocks,

and no fish strike at phantom flies.

A sense of absence everywhere,

as if nothing has the need to breathe,

and no fish strike at phantom flies,

and nothing has the need to speak.

As if nothing has the need to breathe,

the world seems briefly mute,

and nothing has the need to speak.

Soon after rain has stopped, a silence comes.

Late Afternoon Rain

Late afternoon, the thunder came,

long after another rain had dropped,

but when the late, loud thunder roared

that earlier rain had long since stopped.

Was another rain ready to fall?

Touching Different Worlds

1

Afternoons more than mornings

I spent hours watching clouds

forming creatures and stories

in the kingdom of the sky.

Elephant trunks and deer were there,

rhino horns and wild boar tusks,

unicorns and dinosaurs,

and faces of beasts I’d never seen.

And sometimes winds made the creatures crash

while wisps of vapors, unattached,

kept my attention alert:

I was sailing alone on a distant sea.

2

Morning skies, though, seldom mattered.

Mornings were for persimmon fights

and the need to haul up pipes

friends and I had tossed in the creek.

Catfish and crawdads lodged in them.

There were worlds under water,

and worlds under rocks, worlds in tall grass

and worlds in the thick oak woods.

3

Mornings meant earth, but afternoons, sky,

and evening’s games kept me outside.

There were endless worlds I had to explore,

and some were worlds I could barely see:

neighborhood yards full of tarantula holes

and snakes coiled up in flowerbeds.

I had a thousand worlds to explore,

and many of those I could barely see.

Bull Riding at the Atkeisons’ Ranch

The first time I tried to ride the bull

he threw me fast — a sudden twist

and I sailed off his back but missed

the fence — the next time, though, I knew

to strain, to lean against his back.

That worked a rough but sweet wild time —

through bucks and twists my heels beat time

against his neck, then suddenly,

head down, he stopped and I flew off

over head and horns. The world had lost

its sense of speed, and though now tossed,

I hung somehow afloat in air,

and gliding slowly now, I missed

the fresh manure I’d been flying toward,

but when I

Reviews for Soon After Rain

[texasbooklover · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Soon after Rain: New Poems James HoggardWings Press978-1-60940-428-4$16, 83 pagesSoon after Rain is the new poetry collection from James Hoggard, former Poet Laureate of Texas, past-president of the Texas Institute of Letters and winner of the Lon TinkleAward. Inspired by art, travel, politics, classical mythology and weather (to name a few), Soon after Rain is large-hearted as well as large-minded. Hoggard is a prodigious and prolific talent with an intellectual curiosity who produces equally well a pastoral celebration of the benediction of rain (“Soon after rain has stopped, a silence comes when no bird sings and no wind stirs. The world seems briefly mute and sweet attention’s everywhere.”), an anguished, outraged elegy for Nineveh (“…this place had been huge when great cities were few.”) and a bemused lament over questionable land development decisions (“There are no antique shards to dig up here. The Indians dared not set their camps near here.”)Hoggard uses several types of repetition in his work that is rhythmic and therefore frequently comforting, especially when paired with the childlike wonder at the natural world in “Touching Different Worlds”: There were worlds under water,and worlds under rocks, worlds in tall grassand worlds in the thick oak woods.This morphs into an appreciation of humor in nature in “A Clown Show in the Sky” when a scissortail alights on a hawk in flight:I’ve seen these scissortails ride winds in waysthat look as if they’re climbing walls,as if they’ve rearranged the wind so theycan hang in air – they’re conjurers that liketo ride bare-backed the backs of birds like this:the talon-beaked, cold-eyed and fang-clawed hawk.Which contrasts with an adult’s apprehension of the possibilities inherent in spring storms in “A Terror Fills the Air”:as clouds turn black and air becomes pale green:a sickness in the atmosphere, a pallof yellow haze, infection in the air.Travel evokes a sense of continuity in this poet and is a balm for the soul in “Sky Over Knossos”:Gods had been born in the hills near there.Daedalus had built his plane near there,and a freak of a beast once frightened the place,and large-breasted women dancedand, leaping, front-flipped over bulls,and olive oil softened skin, seasoned pots,and wine freed talk into song,and sky and land remained matesin ways my own world had not.Travel fulfills its highest purpose for Hoggard – recognition of ourselves in the other. This is “The Draw of the Other” in its entirety:I’m drawn, I know, toward what I do not know,for foreignness has never made me whatI do not recognize – I see what is,I see what might have been, I see what mightyet come to be, but most I see a formof clarity that’s not till now been mine.I hear new cries for justice, too. I hearcries for compassion now and realizeI’ve pitched my tent most everywhere. I’ve beenwhere there was little left but hope, and thereI saw high bursts of mountain majesty:a shock of craggy forms that were not mineand likely never would be mine though theysomehow found home in me, and I in them.I’m drawn, I know, toward what I do not know.It’s often otherness that blesses me.I read this collection on the best possible day – the first spring thunderstorm had passed through the night before and all was clean and the sun was warm and the breeze was cool and every bird in the vicinity was calling around my cabin in west Texas and I was immersed as senses merged with art. I cannot imagine a collection as suited for spring in Texas as Soon after Rain.