BARRY CALLAGHAN
man of letters
Hogg The Seven Last Words
McArthur & Company, 2001
This volume nearly doubles the size of the Hogg cycle--a series of narrative poems about Callaghan's curious alter-ego, a robust and almost unimaginable man who is at once poet, pilgrim, lover, philosopher, historian, and adventurer. Hogg's earlier travels drew him to Jerusalem from Toronto (or Hogtown, as some locals still call it). This time out, he is in Leningrad, the many-named city that Callaghan has chosen as a metaphor for the life--political, intellectual, social--of the 20th century.
As the great American poet, Hayden Carruth says about the poems collected here: “The centered line contains the murderous image, all the more grim for its sardonic elegance. I know nothing like these poems. They are brilliant extrapolations from an appalled imagination at the end of a dreadful millennium, unquestionably first-rate.”
