A David Huddle Reader: Selected Prose and Poetry (Bread Loaf Series of Contemporary Writers) - Softcover

Huddle is a natural for the distinguished Bread Loaf Contemporary series, a group of readers featuring the work of Donald Justice, Nancy Willard, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz, among others. Huddle's versatility and deep involvement with language and the "journey" of writing are obvious in each of this volume's essays, poems, and short stories. Huddle introduces himself and his work with a piece titled "Confessions of a Multi-Genre Writer: What It Feels Like from the Inside." He assures us that his work, while varied in form, is "all of a piece," and, indeed, his ability to delve far beneath the surface of experience shapes each selection. Huddle's essay topics include the permutations of the writing life, dancing, teaching, and, in a surge of confessional musing, the awkward habit of ogling. The poetry section includes early unpublished poems and several new poems, including "Poem at Fifty, Mostly in Long Lines," which isn't so much about turning 50 as it is about a memory of a driving in a blizzard one night in 1959. The half-dozen stories include one from Huddle's terrific last book, Intimates. Donna Seaman

Unlike other writers published in the series, such as Rosellen Brown and Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Huddle's ( Nature of Learning , LJ 4/1/92) work will be unfamiliar to most readers. Thus, though insightful, his reflective essays on the writing process--thoughts on a novel's rejection, making time to write--lack a necessary frame of reference. Forming the bulk of this collection, the stories are mainly first-person reminiscences of a boy growing up in the Forties and Fifties in a small Southern town. Instead of action there is an innocent charm that, unfortunately, quickly becomes repetitive. Later essays, like the poems that follow, never escape from a preppy, chauvinistic sensibility. This entire collection is adequate but unmemorable.
- Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.