The poems in Babylon in a Jar extend the forceful explorations that Andrew Hudgins began with Saints and Strangers, his first book and a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. Since then, he has probed the nature of Southern experience, the conflict between religion and worldliness, the origins of poetry, the exaltations and perils of family. In this volume he brings such issues down to the old conflict between order and disorder. He responds with passion to the natural world, to history, to inheritance: "before he flooded the rubble, he swept up the dust of Babylon / to give...

Texas Poet Laureate Walt McDonald has published more than eighteen volumes of award-winning poetry. A poet of the landscape, of war and flying, of people just working hard, McDonald is master of the vital image and sound. And he is a poet whose work invites writers such as these gathered here to find and define the elements that delight and fascinate. Each contributor to this volume has followed his own trek of discovery in McDonald s harsh landscapes of arroyos and hardscrabble, in his skies filled with joy and terrors, in those night sweats of pilots. Here, in the territory Walt McDonald...

Andrew Hudgins imagines himself in the life of a now largely forgotten poet, Sidney Lanier, who served as a soldier for the Confederacy.

"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,...