Charlottesville native, one-time Wahoo and poet Ann Hudson walked these same commonplace streets that you and I walk today. Based on her prize-winning collection of poetry, The Armillary Sphere, we can imagine Hudson walked through her hometown like she does in her debut: making her way through poetic memory and imagination, Hudson makes sure to look down at her shoes as well as up at the sky.
Yes, "the wind / drag[s] its nets through the streets, / trawling for its usual and plentiful treasures" in Hudson's poem "First Day of Spring." Its captured objects include Chicago's "crushed styrofoam cups, torn newspapers, / lost gloves, a blizzard of fast food napkins." Though she envisions the oranges of the sky and blues of the sea like countless generations of poets before her, Hudson adds little feather and fluff to an already decorated earth -- "decorated" easily meaning "littered" as well as "adorned."
"At the Window" begins with the crude yellow of "Broad daylight, and a man is peeing / against the building across the alley." It concludes with the color again, only in "daffodils / bow[ing] in the damp breeze the way a woman / bent over a basin rinses her long, blond hair." Whether they seem to litter or adorn the Earth, Hudson brings conflicting images together, spinning dense but effortlessly circular poems while maintaining a narrative structure.
Sure, there are pure moments of the modernist aesthetic (review: the ugly and authentic), such as when a trash scavenger meets a speaker with a suicidal sister in "What We Throw Away." The poem recants, "How surprised he'll be to find the gun
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