BACHELOR HOLIDAY

Royal romance, desolate churchyards, the destruction of a city, and traffic snarled by a snowstorm are among the subjects of these captivating poems.

Much of Huhn’s poetry explores spacious historical scenes through a close-up view of small details that highlight the symbiosis of beauty, brutality, and decay. In these stanzas, the Kassite kings of ancient Babylonia sponsor the crafting of gorgeous rings by importing goldsmiths enslaved in their wars of conquest; a Zuni Indian woman fashions necklaces of turquoise and animal figurines as offerings to the souls of the dead flowing by in the river; and a youthful love affair between the young King Louis XIV of France and Marie Mancini is symbolized by the exquisite pearl earrings he gives her and ends in her death vigil as he “lay abed inside / the perfumed chamber / of their reunion, the / upshot of the countless / flowers gathered to mask / the smell of a leg marbled / black with gangrene.” The author also has a fondness for elegies replete with spectral figures and somber meditations on mortality—he describes a tableau of an abandoned church collapsing in on itself like a lost faith, and a sepulchral vision of a woman dressed in a spider-silk white gown who “stands / on a sea of dead / marked by crooked stone / buoys bobbing in dust”; a memento mori that reminds readers besotted by love that “nothing flies / as fast as life.” And there are less dramatic but still vivid renderings of contemporary scenes: The mundane crisis of a snow day, including a tragic hit-and-run, unfolds in a staticky jangle of AM-radio news reports; a man arrives at the beach “hoping / to get wet // but Untreated / Raw Sewage Spill // No Swimming / said the sign.”

Huhn’s writing is dense, sometimes cryptic (endnotes illuminate some of his more obscure references), and impressionistic; the poems’ structures feel loose-jointed and improvised, but the language is concise and compressed, with a single word suggesting a world. His imagery is dazzlingly evocative, conveying cinematic visuals in the Vesuvian eruption described in “Cast in Herculaneum”: “Mountaintop blossom / blacks out heavens / a sun the gods captured / breaks through crust / pounding free / Luminous / springs burst skyward / Barely time / to scoop up / a handful of / jewels.” Huhn can step down from these mythopoetic heights into a quieter register that, in “Summer Fragment,” infuses the annoying grime of everyday life with a glow of numinous meaning: “Dearest don’t forget / and one last ask— / know anything good / to get gum off shoes? / A wad I picked up / on the boardwalk / won’t scrape off / It sticks like those / heavy summer days / when the thunderstorm / opens down so fast / we forget the sun / was just here.” This is open-hearted, emotionally resonant poetry, never more so than in this simple, exquisite rhyme in “Envoi”: “How lovers soon forget the day / When heaven shone upon the face / That built the little cottage dear / And wrapped with gold the dying year.”

An enthralling collection, with themes both grand and intimate and verses that pack a wallop of feeling.