Todd Hearon’s second collection, No Other Gods, draws richly on his gifts as poet and dramatist. From the sonnets and nonce-forms interspersed throughout, to its central thousand-line verse monologue, No Other Gods strikes the full octave with a jazzed, symphonic roots-music. In its play of masks and voices, one meets a pantheon both sacred and profane—Mnemosyne, Priapus; memory and desire—from Pasiphae, “that daughter of the sun,” to a junked-out “toothless whore named Cookie” of our own century. With mythopoetic propulsion and expanse, No Other Gods is, ultimately, a paean to the human imagination, the force that in the face of negation and nothingness, “sings well into the night.”
Steeped in the lore and cadences of American traditional music, as well as in the refinements of the American/English/Irish poetic traditions, Todd Hearon brings his love for and knowledge of all these to bear fruitfully upon his own roots in a family and a landscape explored with memorial affection and clear-eyed understanding in this exuberantly varied second collection. In a language at ease and at home in its mix of colloquial and lyrical registers, the poet brings to life a world animated by his double instinct (and talent) for both elegy and celebration, a threatened world—poised between myth and the quotidian—from which he sends back many an edgy “Memo.” His power as a poet is to be both down to earth and elevated at the same time. . . No Other Gods is the carefully orchestrated, richly fashioned, thoroughly enjoyable collection of a poet coming into the full exercise of his powers. Eamon Grennan
The mastery displayed in Todd Hearon’s poems—in the complexity and clarity of his rhetorical frames, the beauty and balance of his artifacts, the power and freedom of his imagination, the precision of his music, his anthropological stringency—is astonishing enough. Astonishing beyond hope is the commitment to reality, the developed vision, that this mastery serves.
Vijay Seshadri
Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
