Andrew Hudgins was born in Killeen, Texas, on April 22, 1951. Between his birth and his entry into Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, Alabama, Hudgins and his family followed his father, a career Air Force officer, to New Mexico, England, Ohio, North Carolina, California, and France. Despite this apparent rootlessness, typical of the military lifestyle, Hudgins considers himself a Southerner and derives much of the material for his poems from the images, idioms, and folkways of the Deep South. The poet's parents, Andrew L. and Roberta Rodgers Hudgins, both grew up in the cotton-mill town of Griffin, Georgia, and returned there often to visit their large, extended family. Hudgins's father, a West Point graduate and a man of uncompromising moral uprightness and religious discipline, is an important influence on his son's work. He looms large in Hudgins's childhood memory and in numerous poems as a rather fearful...