First Light
by Lynn Hoggard
In First Light, Hoggard has assembled her most recent and best poems. These are beautiful, touching, and painful accounts of Lynn and Jim Hoggard struggling with his Parkinson’s. The book is an unusual series of poems that merge into a single long poem exploring the intensity and power of devotion, love, and loss. The poems suggest an emotional narrative of interwoven tender and difficult moments, yet each poem is a complete lyric in itself. Readers will want to mark and return to specific poems and will find themselves rereading pages at random. In this remarkable book, Lynn shares what she and Jim experienced during this final, inevitable human journey, one made more difficult and poignant by the ravages of Parkinson’s.
About the Author
Lynn Hoggard taught English and French at Midwestern State University and coordinated the Humanities Program there. In 1997 she was named the MSU Hardin Professor for outstanding teaching, scholarship, and service. She also served as president of the American Literary Translators Association (1997-1999), and has taught in England, France, and Mexico.
Among her eight books are three translations (one of which, Nelida, won the 2003 translation award given by the Texas Institute of Letters), a memoir (Motherland, Lamar University Press, 2014) about growing up in Louisiana, and a poetry collection, Bushwhacking Home (TCU Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Press Women of Texas award for best book of poetry. Her 2017 poem, “Love in the Desert,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Word Fountain, and her poem “In the Garden” was nominated for a “Best of the Net” award by Bluestem. She has published more than one hundred poems in peer-reviewed journals in the U.S.