Making Our Own Rules

Written for The American Poetry Review by Sam Hamill. “Silence is rarely used to better effect that in Michael Hogan’s poems. His new book, Making Our Own Rules, draws from fifteen years of publishing, beginning with pamphlets and chapbooks from Unicorn Press, Gallimaufry and Turkey Press. I wish Hogan had complied a Collected Poems...some of my old favorites are missing. Still, sixty pages of the best of Michael Hogan are very good to have. He paints what he sees—the human agony of the world’s waste. He speaks in the vernacular, his cadence unrushed, and he speaks from direct, personal experience. Hogan appears to come more from a Yeatsian lineage than from the Modernism of Eliot or Pound and the silences between his lines can carry enormous implications. Hogan’s poems are virtually free of the ego and fake emotion, the public posturing and self-regard that infect so much recent poetry. For Hogan to undertake the poem is to undertake the possibility of radical transformation. The humility and compassion of his poems warm me when others leave me chilled to the bone.