My Surly Heart

Reading this book is like starting an idle conversation with a stranger and realizing by the end of the evening you’re sitting with Ghandi, or Bruce Springsteen, both of you singing like catbirds. When I read the last line of “Elrika”—“I can’t name whatever it was they taught me.”—I realize I’ve been taught, slyly, by a master. ~Fleda Brown, former poet laureate of Delaware and author of Breathing In Breathing Out, winner of the 2001 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

David Huddle’s My Surly Heart constellates something of a life review, from homeplace eccentrics—the wry stories we’d expect from this poet—to wrestling conformity’s demons and the shame that stings a man when he no longer has the excuse of being green. There’s regret in lines laced with no regret, a cold look at the real, which flickers at the feeder quicker than any songbird. The poet’s patient spirit of observation of himself and the world brings us many sonorous pleasures in his sonnets and other forms, which rush at us with urgency and insight, sentences pushing into lines, and lines stringing meaning along to revelations of emotion. Huddle finds that he won’t allow this threadbare, tenuous world to fool him twice; it still 'crackle[s] with holiness,' even when religiosity has fled. ~Cathryn Hankla, essayist, poet, and author of many books, including Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home and Galaxies

Every so often, you might return to a friend’s earlier offhand comment, realizing that the observation—so casually offered—was in fact piercingly on-point. Such is the unique tell-it-slant style of David Huddle’s volume My Surly Heart, in which his rigorously conversational talk lays bare what’s unsaid in our public and private lives. The surprise lies beneath his down home geniality. By asking nonchalant questions in many near-pentameter sonnets—such as “What Are You Up To?” and “How Do You Feel About Your Body?”— or by piling up atmospheric layers of musical bliss in the long-lined “How to Enter a Cosmic Quirk,” his colloquially intimate voice sets off uncanny jolts of insight. ~Kevin Clark, author of Self-Portrait with Expletives and In the Evening of No Warning