Though I have a loving and invigoratingly literal father, as a burgeoning poet I find that I am often in search of literary father–types. Robert Frost and W. H. Auden have become tetchy grandpas I beleaguer unabashedly; W. S. Merwin's that bow–tie uncle turned maverick bohemian as his Hawaiian waterfalls; Philip Levine's another uncle, bone–raw, the kind who knows the gritty secrets of both labor and beauty; and Li–Young Lee's the luminous brother–in–law who has serene lessons up his sleeves, like how to let a trapped bird out of the house. Galway Kinnell, bless him, is not just Fergus and Maud's dad—he's everyone's, bless us.

It's with a volume of poetry like John Hodgen's Grace that I realize this ends up happening whether I want it to or not—this patrilineage of poets (certainly not a woman academic's most cosmopolitan admission these days). What draws me in initially is a pronounced craftsmanship, one worth analysis and emulation; yet, as irresistible in another vein, I glean perspective and angle, I hear tone and voice, I glimpse the wild, calculated knack of making connections and meaning; the details tell me of something other than what I am myself, that is, a twenty–something female in the 21st century. Perhaps reading Hodgen's writing is a path to my own father, but it feels more universal. Since Shelly asserted that reading poetry was a way of putting yourself in another's place, can a young woman admit this—that certain poets teach her about the world and experience of a man?

The risk of such musing might be to assume that Hodgen's poetry is categorically paternal or masculine. It is not. His third and prize–winning volume, Grace, earning one of the nation's top awards from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, spends much time reflecting on youthful experiences from that great electric space, retrospection, but at the same time many poems carefully record the chasm between human beings, between what happens and what might have, between our behavior and our desire to behave. Confusion, consternation, and grief are not limited to lilting boyhood recollections. And, just as often, Hodgen's capricious sensibility of a scene, as in "My Mother Swimming," offers the uncrushable delight of being alive:

But there will be moments, she said, smiling, as she turned on her back,
floating, moments like diamonds in our hands, candles on the waves,
and we could make our way to them, hold them one by one,
like the silver beads of water on the head of a baby being baptized,
the breath she takes in like a dream and lets go.

This is the grace of Hodgen's poetry—moments which are more than we deserve but what we ache for our whole lives, moments which speak toward that greater grace; this poem and others are haunting, reminding somehow that it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God. Without being overtly religious, Hodgen's poetry often offers that sense of having been given an incredible gift, something overwhelming and mysteriously precious, never to be remunerated, never to be fully understood. At the same time, his poems convey a spiritual gravitas and a grappling of faith which seems, if not paraded, at least obstinately absorbing. In "Proof," a dying father's body displays "blood vessels that had burst into burgundy, / into hieroglyphics, the blotches like brushstrokes," which, to the narrator, speaks of "some artist's name, the way one would sign his masterpiece"—and becomes an inevitability even for those who go on living, "the proof remaining for all to see, God's autograph, / His certain seal, saying I made this, / this belongs to me."

Hodgen's poem "On a Wing" troubles the specifics of prayer—our tongue–tied efforts, its slippery comfort: "We do not come to prayers. Like sisters they come to us, / wordless, like stones, like the open–mouthed face on a sarcophagus." Yet he ends the poem with a list–like prayer for people, items, circumstances which the poem details, and, in a final rhyming couplet, "for the holes in this house, the wind that comes in and pays no rent, / for the heaven we do not go to, for the heaven that is sent." This lingering poignancy is as sincere as the crows in the poem who offer "their hope hope hope in the air," and though Hodgen pins an adjectival "pea–brained" on the crows, their sounds are, undeniably, reminiscent of the human heart's.

Here and elsewhere, Hodgen alludes to an abiding isolation that seems tethered to grace, as in the rendering of a landscape in the volume's first poem, "Clay County": "And just before the buckwheat field that opens lonely as grace, / the field with the massive tree in the middle, shattered by lightning, / a slender roan horse feeds under its basilica of broken branches, / because he knows that is the place / where the soft tufts of grass / taste the sweetest." In other poems, as at the end of the macabre "Eyes," this isolation becomes more desperate: "And you, what are you looking for right now, / straining, earnest, heroic, keen, / from your deep, impenetrable darkness?"