From Booklist
Huddle's poems are so clear, concrete, and anecdotal that even the most reluctant poetry reader will be seduced, but this is not to say that these are simple poems or one-dimensional works. No, these are neatly compressed, cleverly constructed, adeptly rhythmic, and edgy creations rife with conflicting feelings and a sobering awareness of time. Huddle begins his fifth collection with studies of old family photographs, introducing the concept of the gray scale as a gauge for the black-and-white stasis of memory, the brilliance of the present, the haziness of the future. Bemused and grateful, he calls up the tangiest of his Virginia-based teenage memories, precious and baffling moments of the body's erotic awakenings. Huddle then shifts to nature, penguins in particular, but instead of sharing the revelations of personal observation, he wryly considers our dependence on television for news of the wild, on Jane Goodall for communion with animals. An outstanding novelist as well as a forthright poet, Huddle is a source of light in an often gray world.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Book Description
In his compelling new collection, David Huddle writes, "We think / we stand in the vivid color of here and now / and view the past as drab black and white, / whereas the truth is - it's our future / that's the off-center, badly focused grayscale." Spiraling between the tenses of time, David Huddle creates in these vibrant poems a defense against the encroachment of age through the resources of language and memory, imagination and art. Moments recollected-and admittedly embellished-from his own life and family seem appealingly familiar: a teenage dance, Grandmama's morning coffee, young daughters playing dolls. With age, wonder has become understanding, and so when intimations of his death arise in the midst of sharing a joke with his children, the poet shows us the comfort and peace that murky prospect may hold. Playful and fantastic narratives about penguin clans, Jane Goodall and the chimps, and what to do when it snaows offer wit and craft as further barriers against pain and despair. "In my family we were /all good at dreaming," Huddle's closing poem notes. Undaunted, Huddle gives us in Grayscale not false hopes about our lives but a range of ways to transcend their limits.
