Description
Book SynopsisAmerica’s Tony Hoagland (1953-2018) was known for provocative poems which interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. The poems in his final collection Turn Up the Ocean examine with an unflinching eye and mordant humour the reality of living and dying in a time and culture that conspire to erase our inner lives. Hoagland’s signature wit and unparalleled observations take in long-standing injustices, the atrocities of American empire and consumerism, and our continuing habit of looking away. In these poems, perseverance depends on a gymnastics of scepticism and comedy, a dogged quest for authentic connection, and the consolations of the natural world. Turn Up the Ocean is a remarkable and moving collection, a fitting testament to Hoagland’s devotion to the capaciousness and art of poetry. Tony Hoagland's poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He was American poetry's hilarious 'high priest of irony', a wisecracker and a risk-taker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushed the poem not just to its limits but over the edge.
Trade ReviewHe belongs to that wagon-circle of American poets who believe in a "common reader"…Hoagland is a poet of a ragged, half-satirical, half-lyrical intensity. If Billy Collins is Updike, Hoagland is Salinger, or perhaps Holden Caulfield…making us think we know the ground we are on, then showing us that we don’t… For me, he not only pulls the rug from under my feet when it comes to the moral complacencies and platitudes that I don’t notice I live by, he does the same with my given poetic certainties. -- Henry Shukman * Poetry London *
Hilarious, searing poems that break your heart so fast you hardly notice you’re standing knee deep in a pool of implications. They are of this moment, right now – the present that we’re already homesick for. -- Marie Howe
The writing is classic Hoagland: accessible and conversational, sometimes humorous, as he scrutinises everything from a book he's reading to mortality and the emotions that arise when he thinks of the music of Leonard Cohen while sitting in a hospital waiting room... The work raises important questions 'about the hazards of playing at innocence', why our culture can't seem to make progress and why no one seems to recognise the impending environmental crisis. * The Washington Post *
Table of ContentsBible All Out of Order 3 Gorgon 5 Immersion 7 Disclosure Agreement 9 Botany 11 Why I Like the Hospital 13 Squad Car Light 15 Turn Up the Ocean 17 The Reason He Brought His Gun to School: A Blues 19 Butter 21 Diagnosis 23 Nature Is Strong 25 Illness and Literature 27 “On a Scale of 1–10,” Said the Nurse, “How Would You Rate Your Pain Today?” 28 Bandage 30 American Story 32 Ode to the West Wind 35 How the Old Poetry Happened 36 I Don’t Ask What You’re Thinking 38 Causes of Death 40 Virginia Woolf 42 Four Beginnings for an Apocalyptic Novel of Manners 44 The Power of Traffic 46 Weather of Pain 48 Autumn 50 On Why I Must Decline to Receive the Prayers You Say You Are Constantly Sending 51 Mistaken Identity Librarian Syndrome 53 Landscape without Jason 55 Walk 56 Success 57 Dante’s Bar and Grill 59 King of the Night 61 Siberia 62 Economica 64 The Decline of the Roman Empire 65 Cuisine 66 The Interfaith Chapel Is in the South Terminal 68 Homework 70 Reading While Sick in the Middle of the Night 71 Harbor 72 Incompletion 73 Sunday at the Mall 74 Among the Intellectuals 76 In the Beautiful Rain 77 Peaceful Transition 79 Afterword by Kathleen Lee 83
