A Clown At Midnight: Poems

By Andrew Hudgins

“Recklessness and rigor, in equal measure, mark the stirring poetics of Andrew Hudgins in this fine new book. Hudgins can wrestle a rhyme scheme into submission with one hand tied behind his back and can penetrate the black heart of history with a single, subtly rendered detail. He laughs with Democritus and weeps with Heraclitus and, line by distillate line, contrives a tonic antidote to “the acetone / of American inattention.” — Linda Gregerson

In A Clown at Midnight Andrew Hudgins offers a meditation on humor with a refreshing poignancy and cutting wit. He touches on love and nature, but at its core this collection is about the consolations and terrors, the delights and discomforts, of laughter, taking its title from a quote by Lon Chaney Sr.: “The essence of true horror is a clown at midnight.” Skillfully probing paradoxes, Hudgins conjures the titular clown: “Down these mean streets a bad joke walks alone / bruised head held low, chin tucked in tight, eyes down / defiant. He laughs and it turns to a moan.” Hudgins gives us utter honesty and accessible verse, exploring moments both uncomfortable and satirical while probing the impulse to confront life’s most demanding trials with laughter.

“Hudgins’s poems are often funny, hinging on a joke or wisecrack or malapropism, but human nature red in tooth and claw has always been his greatest theme.” — BookPage

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780544105522

Andrew Hudgins

ANDREW HUDGINS is the author of several books of poems, including Saints and Strangers, The Glass Hammer, and 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 is a professor emeritus of Ohio State University.

Reviews for A Clown At Midnight

[detailmuse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am so early still in exploring poetry. But while I find my way overall, I’m eager to look at contemporary poets, and I was attracted to this collection from Hudgins, described as humorous. Well it’s darkly humorous -- as I should have anticipated from the title and as is confirmed by a quote from Lon Chaney as the epigraph to the title poem: “The essence of true horror is a clown at midnight.” It’s a great poem -- the most memorable in this collection of 58 -- and begins:Down these mean streets a bad joke walks alone,bruised head held low, chin tucked in tight, eyes down,defiant. He laughs and it turns to a moan.He repeats some of those words and phrases through the rest of the poem and they echo, hauntingly.A couple snips I especially liked in other poems, this from Swordfish:My fingertips marveled at the silvery shimmer,already less silver, less shimmery than when it lived.I never again should cause flesh this beautifulto be less beautiful, I thought.and this from Now and Almost Now:Under dawn light,cars glow, and a paper,heavy with yesterday,reposes on the walk.And my favorite of the collection, Night Harvest:From my neighbor’s dark garden I harvested asparagus;I pilfered slender spears from their feathery bedand clipped buds of American Beauty. All springand into early autumn I savored a fragranceredolent of theft. Through summer I plucked squash,beans, and more squash from his vines.In the yard where I watched his daughter marry,I divided hostas by moonlight and daylilies too,keeping half. My neighbor’s dead, the house for sale,and after dark his garden’s mine to love and plunder.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)