I am really enjoying poetry this spring 2020—both reading it and writing it. Something about this global pandemic has shifted my readerly and writerly preferences. Maybe it’s the meditative nature of poetry that it causes us to think deeply and differently about our world. Maybe it’s that poetry books are typically less dense than other types of books—fewer words on each page, fewer words overall. I’m sure I’m not the only one feeling stretched thin and burnt out with all that this new way of life in light of COVID-19 entails.

Incandescent Visions

By Lee Hudspeth

BOOK REVIEW by ALEXIS MARIE CHUTE

Incandescent Visions by Lee Hudspeth was an enjoyable short read. What Hudspeth’s book brings to light, through the poems and other writing about the poems, is the idea of people thinking about thinking (metacognition). This idea helps take the poetry to a deeper level. I’m a good audience for this; I am definitely one to enjoy thinking about thinking.
The way Hudspeth writes about nature is particularly entrancing. For example, the poem entitled “Wanderlust” includes such lush descriptions like “stardust factory” and “ethereal strings of time and space and wandering souls.”
I get feelings of the broadness of nature and the world, while images are painted in my mind, so specific and small in their observations—“a smooth emerald pebble, a blue feather, an archipelago of musical notes” from the poem “Exquisite Ercolano”—that I sense the connectedness of everything.
Especially now, being at home for months, I love poems that take me to new places.
Chapter two is about nostalgia and I felt myself waxing into my own memories. This is the power of poetry; to be specific and yet elicit imagery that we all can relate to.
I loved the poem entitled “Crescent Moon.” It’s topical. We continue to be captivated by the moon, the same moon our ancestors looked upon, and it holds more mystery and inspiration than our social media heavy culture, our news obsessions, ever could.
The poem called “Stronger” is powerful. As someone who has struggled with depression over the course of my life, this poem resonated. It beautifully depicts the feeling of being in the pit of despair, how it’s hard to see that your struggle will make you stronger, though it inevitably does.
Amid big life topics, there is a sliver of humor in Incandescent Visions. The poem “Backward” gave me a good chuckle and made me reminisce of my own memories of strange chance encounters with unexpected individuals.
To the structure of Incandescent Visions:
I did not care for the explanations of the poems at the beginning of each chapter, the ‘Chapter Prologues,’ which comment on the poems that follow. I think as readers, we should intuitively understand the poems without much if any need for extra extrapolation. In some cases, I did in fact need to lean on these descriptions because some of the poems felt vague, lacking description or an anchoring scene or idea. This is also true for the ‘Afterward: Author’s Comments.’ Here there is more behind-the-scenes description, which I wish Hudspeth had brought into the poems themselves.

Hudspeth writes about places and people, infusing meaning into his experience of the world. Incandescent Visions is both intimate and universal, private and public. Hudspeth is a deeply perceptive author, creating unique pictures in readers’ minds. The book excels at word economy with short poems that are musical and rhythmic. It makes sense that the author is a musician; this background makes his words sing.

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SIDE NOTE:
I read Incandescent Visions as an e-book—the first time I’ve ever read poetry in this format—and I think I would have rather liked taking these poems outside, into nature, on the printed page. The poems invited me to slow-read them. To sit and ponder. Digital doesn’t feel slow to me. Perhaps this is because I do a great deal of my profession on devices, but, still, I came away feeling the pull that poetry is best read—at least by me—in a tactile, physical form.

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Catch you next week!

Happy writing,

   –   Alexis Marie Chute