AFTER THE LOST WAR A Narrative

A long sequence of poems based on the life of a largely forgotten 19th-century Southern poet seems at first an academic, if not pedantic, exercise; but Hudgins's portrayal of Sidney Lanier vibrates with an emotional and intellectual vitality its subject would envy. On the framework of external eventsLanier's Civil War experiences, marriage, fatherhood, illnessHudgins constructs a philosophical narrative, the inner struggle of one mind to make sense of the "strange, impersonal violences/that nature gives us." Free of the sentimentality and archaisms too often present in Lanier's own poems, these deft tetrameter lines may well outlast the ones that inspired them.