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| Richard Hoffman |
NOON UNTIL NIGHT by Richard Hoffman (
Barrow Street Press $16.95)
Review by Doug Holder
When I read the poetry collection
“Noon Until Night” by Richard Hoffman, I said to myself, “Damn,
this is one wise dude.” I think Hoffman has a way of reporting back
to us through his own scars, displaying the bullshit we will
encounter, and then he tells us in an avuncular way, “ Move on.”
Hoffman is a Senior Writer in Residence
at Emerson College in Boston, the author of two memoirs and several
collections of poetry. I will be teaching his harrowing and
artistically rendered memoir of childhood abuse “ Half the House”
at Endicott College this fall.
I think to a great extent we try to
figure out the puzzle of our fathers in order to understand
ourselves. In the poem, “ A Face in the Ceiling”, Hoffman pens a
wonderful paragraph (among others)—a scene-- a set-- that captures
the complexities, the sorrows of a father, and his need and attempt
for transcendence. And there is a boy beside him who intuitively
senses this, and tries to bring him out of his malaise,
as he was in my earliest memories,
home
from “ the steel” where he laid
track in the yards,
sprawled on the floor of the living
room, spent,
in his boxer shorts in front of an
oscillating fan
that dinged at intervals at some point
in its sweep
( I swear I can hear it now. I can hear
it!)
I lay next to him, and he asked if I
could see
the faces in the cracked and
water-stained ceiling.
And in his title poem, “Noon Until
Night”, Hoffman gives a sort of road map for life. It is for those
on the first half of the roller coaster ride-- all the way to where
that fat lady is about to sing her swan song.
One of us is going to have to rise and
set out, then,
with no assurance of arrival, nor of
any welcome
if we make it there where we guessed
the new to be,
just like the old days, in leaky boats,
through storms
toward a hunch, toward what we've been
told of by others
whose credibility is vouched for only
by their scars
and the cohesion and agreement of their
stories, though
we know they're not beyond a bit of fun
at our expense
and always want to be remunerated for
intelligence,
so we have to weigh, still, the tone,
the spirit if you will,
with which of course is offered to us,
at the same time
we have everything to lose, friends,
and no time to waste.
Hoffman is able to find joy and
consolation a midst the carnage of this world .He tells us to seize the
day...life is comically and inevitably short. In some ways this book
is a primer for life, that can be referred to as you pass through its
dangerous shoals.
