Inventories

Poetry. Paul Hogan’s poems, Inventories, travel through woman, mother, into the natural world, dissolve in spirit and then coalesce again into man, father, the fact of death. They are careful accounts, fearless inventions, always crashing “the crystal of what I knew/ against the cold stone of what I didn’t.” Hogan’s poems do not seek to tell us how the world works; they want to “make it all inexplicable again.” His attention to what can and cannot be touched in life keeps Hogan and the reader on the edge of a clear, high gorge where the only viable response is to jump. —Sherry Robbins, author of or, The Whale