{"id":11216,"date":"2020-03-10T11:55:15","date_gmt":"2020-03-10T10:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11216"},"modified":"2020-03-10T12:10:03","modified_gmt":"2020-03-10T11:10:03","slug":"tony-hoagland-priest-turned-therapist-treats-fear-of-god-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11216","title":{"rendered":"Tony Hoagland | Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tony Hoagland | Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God<\/em> | Bloodaxe Books: \u00a39.95<\/strong> <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tony Hoagland once commented that he would position his writing between that of Sharon Olds and Frank O\u2019Hara, between the confessional and the social. For a poet, who\u2019s most lauded book was called What Narcissism Means to Me<\/em>, that yoking doesn\u2019t seem out of place. It feels certain that the \u2018I\u2019 in the poems in the book under review, Hoagland\u2019s last before his untimely death two years ago, is Hoagland himself. If there are personas present in these poems, then the personas feel very close to that of the writer, the authorising consciousness of the poetry. That sense of intimacy supports, perhaps, Dwight Garner\u2019s comment that \u2018At his frequent best \u2026 Hoagland is demonically in touch with the American demotic.\u2019 The poems do sometimes feel inhabited by demons. And the title of this new book is nothing if not \u2018in-your-face\u2019; is Hoagland, the priest, the therapist, or even the \u2018fear of God\u2019? <\/p>\n

One of Hoagland\u2019s demons, and one he is expert at honing in on, is a particularly deracinated and irritated sense of masculinity. The poems seem to reach out to that particular kind of selfhood, and then reflect that energy in the address of the poem. In \u2018Dinner Guest\u2019, for example, Hoagland creates a female dinner guest who, visiting \u2018the ladies\u2019 room\u2019, opens the medicine cabinet and finds \u2018a bottle labelled Male Enhancement Formula\u2019. Hoagland then creates the female guest\u2019s thoughts, <\/p>\n

Is this the funny little thing, she wonders,
\nthat has caused so many wars? so many
\nmurders and exploded buildings?
\nso many smashed-down doors and refugees? <\/p>\n

The poem\u2019s narrator\/Hoagland then comments, <\/p>\n

And in a way, of course, she is correct. The need to
\nengineer an outcome, the desire to
\nfeel confident that what you want to happen
\nwill happen when you want \u2013 <\/p>\n

and then at the end of the poem, \u2018the men are saying \/ that injustice can be eliminated.\u2019 <\/p>\n

All this is, of course, a dangerous strategy: Hoagland\u2019s male attempt to assume a female personality and then a \u2018female\u2019 interpretation; that sense that the poem is an attempt to pre-empt that interpretation. These might be seen as yet another attempt to \u2018mansplain\u2019. And those final two lines might not necessarily be \u2018ironic\u2019, since it is a male writer who is attempting to ironize. There\u2019s a lot of hubris in there. <\/p>\n

However, other poems avoid that kind of trap and are much more successful at accessing a more contested sense of masculinity. Hoagland\u2019s \u2018Rain-father\u2019 posits a son sending a letter to his father, \u2018sick, maybe even dying far away.\u2019 Hoagland creates a, perhaps, \u2018standard\u2019 scenario in which the son feels guilt towards the father. Here, however, Hoagland has the ability to particularise that guilt in good, affecting ways, <\/p>\n

\u2018good enough if you manage to conceal
\nyour rage, which has no reason anymore.<\/p>\n

Tell him no matter how far off you are,
\nyou are always living in his country;
\ntell him you yourself are an envelope
\nmailed from his address,<\/p>\n

posted with a stamp that has his face on it.
\nHe is the language that you use
\nwhen you speak harshly to yourself,
\ntrying to hide the fact that you are lost. <\/p>\n

Hoagland\u2019s ability here, is to work the trajectory of the poem from its beginning, \u2018It is the kind of faint barely falling drizzle \/ in which you write a letter to your father\u2019 through the modulation of that, \u2018In your letter your description of the rain \/ must be affectionate in tone, \/ to suggest a basic cheerfulness of heart, \/ but wet, to suggest your consciousness of pain \u2013 <\/p>\n

There is no doubt that Hoagland is good at a sense of reaching out to the Other. As we have seen, that reaching out, Hoagland\u2019s reading into the consciousness of the Other, can feel a little jarring where that reaching out might be a kind of colonizing as with \u2018Dinner Guest\u2019. But Hoagland\u2019s poetry is driven by a real attempt to empathize. In \u2018Rain-Father\u2019, there is sympathy for both the father and the son. <\/p>\n

In \u2018Upward\u2019, which begins the final, fourth section of the book, writes with some envy about his friend Jack, who, \u2018With the help of Zen \u2026 dissolved his disagreements \/ with the world, \/ purified his quarrels, \/\/ shushed his ego, \/stopped biting back \/ when bitten\u2019. At the same time, Hoagland\u2019s sympathy is with those left behind when others, such as Jack, have floated \u2018Upward\u2019. Thus, he comments with some asperity at the end of the poem, \u2018leaving a few \/ hundred million of us \/ behind, \/ weeping and holding on \/ to our vanished friends,\/ our stormy weather, \/ and our extended \/\/ allegiance to stones.\u2019 In the end, perhaps, Hoagland speaks to our need to deal well with the world and others, and the way in which such aspirations will often, if not usually, fail. <\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tony Hoagland | Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God | Bloodaxe Books: \u00a39.95 Tony Hoagland once commented that he would position his writing between that of Sharon Olds and Frank O\u2019Hara, between the confessional and the social. For a poet, who\u2019s most lauded book was called What Narcissism Means to Me, that yoking doesn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nTony Hoagland | Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11216\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tony Hoagland | Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Tony Hoagland | Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God | Bloodaxe Books: \u00a39.95 Tony Hoagland once commented that he would position his writing between that of Sharon Olds and Frank O\u2019Hara, between the confessional and the social. 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