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The Secret History
by Michael Hulse
Michael Hulse's moving new collection is a quest for the meaning of home. These are meditations on the parents and childhood God he has lost, the national legacies of England and Germany he was born into, and the discovery of home through love. The marriage of imaginative scope and emotional directness that Sean O'Brien observed in Michael Hulse's writing has never been so compellingly displayed as in these poems. Tender, venturesome, charged with intellectual energy, The Secret History is eloquent testimony to Hulse's technical virtuosity, and shows a poet at the height of his powers.
After too long a wait, Michael Hulse's new book shows us just what we have been missing. The old erudition and technical control is still there, but now wedded to more profound emotional explorations; achingly direct poems as son and lover retain all their beauty and accomplishment and hurt. Europe is present in its dark corners as well as its cultural light, loss as well as love, in poetry which is raw and sophisticated, and important to anyone interested in how it's written now.
Almost painfully direct, the poems of The Secret History testify to a new depth and a new tenderness in Michael Hulse's voice. The shadow of his dead father, and the light of new love, meet here in a collection that is impossible to put down and that lingers in the heart as much as in the memory.
ISBN: 978-1-906570-24-8 (pbk), 978-1-906570-25-5 (hbk)
Dimensions: 138 x 216 mm
Pages: 116
Published October 2010
