New Songs of Innocence

＂Poetry is language at play. In New Songs of Innocence S.J. Hodson is hard at work in this playground teasing us with syllabic verse (＂Beside Himself with Calm＂), haiku stanzas (＂A Cougar Strolled By＂), sonnet, (＂Sonnet for Miriam＂), and villanelle (＂A Poet’s Dark Night of the Soul＂). He relishes the natural rhythm of speech and knows how to polish it metrically. He rhymes in wonderfully complex ways, combining end rhyme, internal rhyme, slant rhyme, sight rhyme and the unexpected sudden break from rhyme.

But poetry isn’t just play, however clever. Language is a serious matter. It’s not working unless it opens us up to our world. Beauty is at once at odds with and requires truth. In this ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, S.J. Hodson comes down squarely on both sides. At its best poetry teaches without preaching. If Blake’s Songs of Innocence calls established religion into question to recover wonder at the religious spirit that gives birth to it, Hodson’s New Songs of Innocence means to call into question science, the established religion of our time, to wonder again at what gives birth to it, the scientific spirit. [...]

[Hodson] writes not so much to please his audience as to tease and teach his audience-and what a pleasure it is to be taught this way. Making poetry is for him serious-a way to think, a way to wonder. But he is also masterful at playfully seducing others to wonder. If ’philosophy begins in wonder, ’ these poems are invitations to philosophize. S.J. Hodson is one of the most interesting and talented poets of his generation, and yet he remains known to only a very few. In New Songs of Innocence, we are graced with his first published book of poetry. We should be thankful and hope it will not be his last.＂ Taken from the Introduction by Michael Davis

S. J. Hodson studied with Annie Dillard and completed his thesis, a collection of poems called Beside Ourselves With Calm. In 1984, a long poem from that collection, ＂Movement in a Solid--a Composite Figure of the Poet in the 20th Century＂ (included in this volume) was awarded a Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry by Nimrod literary journal.