LAST THINGS

Loss, longing, enigmatic critters, and the downside of paradise are among the subjects explored in this volume of poems.

Hussman, an American literature professor emeritus, crafts densely packed, alliterative verse to explore the depths and heights of Creation. Many of the sometimes-luminous, sometimes-astringent poems spotlight the wildlife around his Oregon home, from a comic tableau of eagles who, “looking a bit abashed…share a beached crab with a lowly crow,” to sea gulls whose scramble for food holds mordant lessons. (“Bags of crumbs or scraps of salmon / make a mayhem of wings and beaks. / Feel for those that sadly lose out, / but losing is what life is finally about.”) While nature can be an arena of conflict, the poet also sees it as a cyclical wholeness: “Driving rains create these sudden ponds, / with help from nimbus farther up, / and higher still the clash of ice and dust, / begun as sun warms earth’s waters.” Human desire and grief enter into other poems that memorialize a dog’s death (“Then came the cruelest needle, the one that sends / a dozing dog into paroxysms that portend the end….Then sobbing to wrench the guts and unease the mind”), an elderly man’s hopeless devotion to music (“He would sit at his dust-covered piano and ‘play.’ / Disconnected notes making no sense, / stone deafness leaving little to inform his fingers, / pushing too lightly for sustained sound”), and a woman’s impenetrable suicide (“Friends wondered about her choice, / which lacks or losses pushed her to call it quits in this so final way / Father that raped her as a child? / Mother who silently watched?...Useless to apportion blame for THE END. / Just roll the credits”). And there’s spirituality mixed with irony here, including visions of an unsatisfying heaven—“What if you get your fill of fulfillment, / can’t take perfection anymore? /…Better to tread this stunning earth, / relish the feel of mortal flesh”—and a seductive circle of hell. (“Pity straight males of the innumerable legion, / endlessly airborne through this nether region. / Limitless strumpets winging fore and aft, / eternally foiled come-ons driving us daft.”) Suffused with vibrant imagery, subtle nuance, understated emotions, and a spaciousness of conception grounded in evocative details, Hussman’s poetry makes for an engrossing read.

A first-rate collection of poetry that celebrates things both earthy and exalted.