FIRST FIRE, THEN BIRDS
Obsessionals 1985–2010
New and Selected Poems
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LINES OF INQUIRY
Etruscan Press | November 2011
H. L. Hix’s Lines of Inquiry fairly effervesces, seltzered by the range of its occasions (Spanish lessons in Oaxaca, teaching American poetry in Shanghai, a forum for students and faculty in an MFA program), its topics (Herbert Morris’s poetry, Ursula von Rydingsvard’s sculpture, the sonnet), its evidence (Johnny Cash’s last cd, the Proto-Indo-European root of “orgy,” his Latin professor’s smudged bifocals), and its approaches (verse essays, letters, interviews).
Yet in his introduction, Hix identifies a single ambition: “not analysis or critique of the poem, but attunement to it, a ‘disclosive submissiveness’ through which things that matter to us — law and grace; war and peace; pity and fear; faith, hope, and love; remembrance of things past — can be sought, not by inspection but by attention.”
Such unity from variety arises because, as with Plato’s dialogues (invoked by Hix in the book’s introduction as models), each of these explorations, whatever its topic or occasion, implicitly poses the question “What is the good life for humans?” So if he asks what a poem is, Hix also asks why it matters, and if he asks how sculpture differs from drawing, he also asks why we should care.
Hix’s lines of inquiry yield surprising answers to pressing questions.