Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty

Hoagland’s fourth collection finds him cynically observing America during and after the Bush presidency. The speaker of these poems is deeply disheartened by his country and his own complacence, though far from unable to churn up good-natured jokes out of the mess. “After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall/ played softly by an accordion quartet/ through the ceiling speakers at the Springsdale Shopping Mall,/ I understood there’s nothing/ we can’t pluck the stinger from,” opens “Hard Rain.” Near the end of the same poem, Hoagland admits, “I used to think I was not part of this,/ that I could mind my own business and get along,// but that was just another song.” Hoagland has much in common with the popular Billy Collins—a sharp, if deadpan, wit; accessible, almost prosey lines; a penchant for self-consciously drawing the reader’s attention to the artifice of the poem—but with a more musically attuned ear and a darker outlook: “I was driving home that afternoon/ in some dilated condition of sensitivity/ of the kind known only to certain poets/ and more or less everybody else.” At his best, Hoagland is capable of showing us how truly marvelous “our marvelous punishment” can be. (Feb.)