When Andrew Hudgins was thirty-five, his first collection of poetry, Saints and Strangers (1985), was a runner-up for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize. (The recipient that year was Henry Taylor, who won for The Flying Change [1985].) In the time that has elapsed since then, Hudgins has published four other books of poetry and a collection of essays. His third book of poems, The Never-Ending: New Poems (1991), was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poet's Prize, the Witter Bynner Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry (1995 and 1998), and has served as an Alfred Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. While Hudgins is widely recognized as a poet who traditionally works in meter, he has also built a reputation as a representative voice of the American South. Both classifications--formalist...