In My Surly Heart, the prolific poet and novelist David Huddle reflects on turning seventy-six years of age and records his aghast reactions to changes brought about by the current president of the United States. Huddle avoids the pitfalls of speechifying, pseudo-philosophizing, or indulging in unmitigated complaint. Instead, he embraces the potential of poetry to use intelligence, wit, language, knowledge, and sense of form to move toward useful revelations. Throughout this idiosyncratic collection of verse, Huddle deploys poem making as a method for psychologically and spiritually navigating from his past to his present life and on into whatever his future may hold. These poems traverse childhood memories, birding adventures, musical reveries, the role of art, and many points in between. My Surly Heart shows a celebrated poet confronting the challenges of age and country with wry humor and unsparing honesty.
"Every so often, you might return to a friend's earlier offhand comment, realizing that the observation-so casually offered-was in fact piercingly on-point. Such is the unique tell-it-slant style of David Huddle's volume My Surly Heart, in which his rigorously conversational talk lays bare what's unsaid in our public and private lives. The surprise lies beneath his down home geniality. By asking n
Kevin Clark, author of Self-Portrait with Expletives and In the Evening of No Warning
