Hudgins's Saints and Strangers was nominated for a 1986 Pulitzer prize this second book is also an epic achievement. As a marriage of poetry and fiction, this highly readable narrative combines the best of both forms into an intensely moving history. The character of Lanier is so full, rich and subtly human, we feel his grief so strongly, it seems that the Civil War and Reconstruction were only yesterday. Andrew Hudgins, After the Lost War: A Narrative (Houghton Mifflin, 1988)I read Hudgins collection The Never-Ending a few months back, and after I had. He conjures up landscapes, voices, culture his account of the war's carnage and brutality is as horrifying as anything in the literature of war. Hudgins's version of events is an inquiry into the soul of the South as much as of the poet. Lanier fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War at war's end he returned home to the barren, poverty-stricken South, but never recovered entirely from his injuries. Hudgins's subjector protagonist, if you willis Georgia-born poet and musician Sidney Lanier (1842-81), a one-time resident of Hudgins's native Montgomery, Ala. Verse this may be, but it is at the same time a historical novel if not a fictional biography.
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