Ecstatic in the Poison: New Poems

There is a subversive streak to Andrew Hudgins's orderly, accessible poetry that sets him apart from his more transcendent peers: he consistently undercuts himself. Metaphysically and otherwise, he is forever seeing his life clearly and spilling a Coke on his lap at the same time. Most of this collection balances between irony and awe and seems always about to tip either way. The marvelous opening poem, in which the speaker recalls playing as a child in the ''temporary heaven'' of DDT spray, could only have been written by someone sneakily intimate with both the sacred and profane: there's no condescension -- just a touch of Dickinson -- in his description: ''The white clouds tumbled down our streets / pursued by spellbound children / who chased the most distorting clouds, / ecstatic in the poison.'' Hudgins, whose collection ''The Never-Ending'' was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1991, enjoys being a troublemaker; the conventional surface of his poems makes for a sly disguise as he crosses boundaries and disrupts the ordinary or expected. ''Don't gawk! Why not? It's wrong. / But still I peeked,'' he writes in ''Grandma's Toenails,'' and he doesn't hesitate to tell us what he sees: ''Nails humped and buckled / on calluses . . . what a world / they almost opened!'' Part of what makes Hudgins such a pleasure -- and carries the reader over the occasionally repetitive arrangements -- is his great storytelling gift and his role as an acidly self-deprecating central character. It might seem wrong to praise a collection of poems this way, but ''Ecstatic in the Poison'' reads like a novel.Reviewed by Matthew Flamm, NYTBR, 12/28/03