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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 is the author of fifteen books of
poetry, fiction, and essays, including The Story of a Million
Years, La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl, Summer Lake:
New and Selected Poems, and Grayscale. He teaches at
the University of Vermont, the Bread Loaf School of English, and
the Rainier Writing Workshop.
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