American poet Tony Hoagland provided a fitting and satisfying finale to round off this year’s Aldeburgh poetry festival on Sunday afternoon. His poetry abounds with warmth, wit, anger, and humanity, and rich, resonant lines.

‘The Neglected Art of Description’ refers to “a mysterious place of cables and connections … where one might encounter the soul”. Introducing a poem about marshes, which he said chimed in with the flatlands around Snape, Hoagland said that we “visit nature to visit certain landscapes in ourselves”. ‘The Grammar of Sparrows’ finds “the birds, like little defeated soldiers, hiding in the chest-high reeds”.  

Many of Hoagland’s poems are infused with anger at commercialisation and commodification – more than one is set in a shopping mall. He is irritated in one mall by music “played softly by an accordion quartet … there’s nothing we can’t pluck the stinger from”. He points to the quoting of Thoreau to sell retirement homes in the Everglades. In 'Real Estate' he sighs: "I suppose evil is too strong a word." You suspect it isn't.  

‘Crazy Motherfucker Weather’ is about getting older and no wiser – “we go on, and we want to be more alive”. In the poem he observes that he is “already starting to look forward to my lethal injection”, wonders whether he is “entering the season of tantrums and denunciations”, and “if a third choice exists, between resignation and going round the bend”.

These are poems that don’t require unpicking or worrying over to be understood. Some poets might feel the need to cloak all this in metaphor and ambiguity, to hide it in a semi-secret code. Why would you want to?

Earlier at the festival Hoagland took his audience on a brisk, informative and exhilarating flight through the uses of idiom, and its relations to the culture in which it is embedded. Idiom is language worn, possibly worn out through use. How is an idiomatic poet to draw us in? Its use is a form of flattery, inviting the reader to join the club of those familiar with its vernacular; to enjoy its flirtation with cliché. Hoagland’s first example was a couplet translated from the Roman poet Catullus: “You’re just too much, Naso – too much for men to handle / although you’re certainly willing to handle most men.” The first line draws us in with the slang of “too much’, indeed, “to handle’ before the second pulls the switch on us with its erotic manipulation. If you will, idiom meets metaphor.

Then we took to the air with the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai’s ‘Air Hostess’. The idiom here not only in the choice of language but through the nuance (the poet assumes we share) of the rituals of air travel. The hostess cautions to “please extinguish all smoking materials”, not specifying “cigarette, cigar or pipe”. The poet tells himself “you [the hostess] have beautiful love materials / and I didn’t specify either.” The idiom of ritual is set up against an erotic metaphor, played out through the rest of the poem: the idiom of the flight and the unreachable hostess, “one of those who have only one love in their life”.

Still keeping up his airspeed, Tony Hoagland turned last to a celebrated Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem from the 1950s, “Sometime During Eternity”, a poem that uses the Beat idiom to speak of the life of Jesus; a bebop theology: “And that the cat [Jesus] / who really laid it on us / is his Dad.” This approach can be taken and intended soberly. “They stretch him on the Tree to cool” until, we get to learn from “ ... a roundup / of late world news / from the usual unreliable sources”, that he’s “real dead”. And with this idiomatic tour de force, Tony Hoagland’s talk got to its destination, a fully justified round of applause.

Greg Freeman and David Andrew