Hoodlum Birds (Penguin Poets)

By Eugene Gloria

In Eugene Gloria's acclaimed first collection of poems, Drivers at the Short-Time Motel, ephemeral lives, and souls lost in the tattered fabric of war, displacement, and ruined love, found hope, redemption, and a common voice. Gloria is interested in illustrating the common man's search for connection to the self and to the world, and that is very much apparent in his second collection. The speaker of these poems examines his lapsed Roman Catholic identity and his past; Spain, and its long and varied influence on Filipino culture; and the famous pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143036440
• ISBN13: 9780143036449
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.4" x 0.3" x 5.5"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

This is the one book of contemporary poetry I really want to buy today

In Hoodlum Birds Gloria leaves behind the jaded edge that was so prevelant in Drivers at the Short-Time Motel -- a welcome departure -- and presents us with something calmer, more insightful, and much more delightful to read. Even writing from small town Indiana, no one can doubt Gloria's comitment to a sense of personal identity rooted in place and culture within America. A must read for anyone seeking out the work of contemporary poets or that of Asian American poets at their best.

Factory of Flowers

HOODLUM BIRDS lacks the freshness of DRIVERS AT THE SHORT TIME MOTEL, but what it loses in novelty appeal it gains in wisdom and the sober learning curve of one no longer in his first youth. Eugene Gloria, one of the midwest's top poets, hasn't shaken off his Filipino roots even in De Pauw, and many of the poems here speak of a youth vibrantly lived in San Francisco. He will be happy to know that even today, the 47 bus was late (a set up for one of the many lyrical celebrations of SF that line this book like shelf paper). He likes to tell stories in verse, which makes an odd appeal to the kind of oral tradition poetry used to be noted for. With his long, thick hair and sensitive eyes and mouth, I bet he slays them on the lecture circuit and in the classroom. His litany of saints and martyrs is always compelling, and he is able to show the workers of the divine always in clockwork conjunction with the rest of us failed human beings. Gloria has a big heart, like a William saroyan in poetry, and here and there, some of Saroyan's bruised tenderness spills out of his line and into the white margins of the page. I imagine he would be a wonderful short story writer, and I hope he pursues this vein, for a few of the pieces here are really less poetry than fiction, and onewonders why he bothered putting them into line breaks. "One Train" for example, is the story of how, when the speaker was young, the woman he loved cheated on him with another guy, and in response he found himself another woman, one whom he remembers with the kind of passionate urgency with which Gretta Conroy, at the end of Joyce's "The Dead," summons up the misty memory of loving Michael Furey back in the day. It is simple, it is devastating, it is utterly controlled. At the opposite end of the spectrum the title poem, "Hoodlum Birds," is a little embarrassing, with its comparison of crows to neighborhood toughs--"They are my homeys of the air," what, are you kidding? But what do I know, famous Robert Pinsky has singled out these lines as among the crowning achievements of this superb collecton. It is undoubtedly an anthology setpiece, but I prefer the quieter, perhaps more oblique Gloria, the man who writes, "In this rare sunlight, the pink blossoms/ expose their modesty, exempt from history."