For whatever reason, much of the criticism on Gabriel Gudding’s first book of poems is as preoccupied with the anus as Gudding himself (no small feat), which is as confounding as it is unfortunate. Just as I am grateful that my undergraduate class on the The Canterbury Tales always managed to avoid infatuation with the fart scenes, I am certain that Mr. Gudding’s talent deserves the same mature attention (even if his work encourages precisely the opposite).

            Just a quick scroll through customer reviews of the book on www.amazon.com demonstrates what a bitterly polarized response it engenders. That Gudding’s work provokes such ire from so many only reveals it as one of the best things that has happened to poetry in our young century.

            Gudding’s voice—muscular, fiendish and brilliant—is exactly the force needed to expel the morbid self-importance pervading poetry’s current establishment: poets writing threats of bodily harm to critics who refuse to adore their work, for instance, or the persistent and deliberately alienating dismissal of MFA students as deluded dilettantes, when many of them are merely lovers of literature taking advantage of an outlet (God forbid) more widely available today than ever before.

            As welcoming as it is evasive, Gudding’s refreshing lack of self-regard is the kind of thing from which the sneering literati have much to learn. These poems spare nothing from the delightful wrath of their instincts for both the comical and the profound, a boundless range of vision that includes everything from lemonbars devoured “in the cool half-forgotten church basement” to the absurd Charles Bernstein’s “titties,” which the poet makes sure to “overlook,” an effort as relieving to this reader as it must be to Gudding.

            Critics who dismiss Gudding’s A Defense of Poetry as a book of fart jokes do little more than advertise their own stubborn aesthetic prejudices. This is a book for those willing to loosen their ties a bit and dig in, and the rewards it offers them are endless. Deliriously in love with language, Gudding conceals his descriptive and lyrical genius with an impeccable comic timing, making for some of the most interesting and memorable poetry published in recent years.

            These poems never begin at the beginning, always launching right into the thick of things, simultaneously leaving and inviting the reader to catch up to the electric pace of his mind. A poem called “Robert Lowell” opens with a “people-hating cheetah” of a dog chasing a grandmother past an “oaken fence” (because one must never sacrifice precision for the sake of a good joke, of course), and later relates an episode in which a baroque vase is inserted into the nostril of a cow.

            A poem dedicated to Ken Burns begins, “My dearest Beloved Mommy, I have only one diaper left,” and Gudding’s vituperative “A Defense of Poetry” includes this inquiry into the nature of Ravens, enclosed, naturally, in a footnote:

Much of the fun in reading Gudding’s work is finding out where he will take you next, flipping the page to discover what other part of his imagination’s unending train-wreck he will chose to cast a light on, whether delineating the “sunlight stuck in the clay at the bottom-end / of pools” or a large bell that has crawled out of a steeple “big tired mouth dragging / across the dirty snow like an early morning kiss.”

            These occasional bursts of astounding description are the moments that make the book so worthwhile. It is in the few instances where such gorgeous writing is extended for entire stanzas that one gets the sense of reading work that is not good, but great. Perhaps no single passage in the book exemplifies this more convincingly than in Gudding’s stunning description of a parent:

Something swam up from the depths to his eyes—an old thought, from the look of it, a battered green carp that had prudently stayed at the bottom of some fetid lake in him, and had rarely seen light—but all it made was a slight watery splutter at his lips, when it flashed away and was gone again.

            It isn’t always easy to know what the hell he’s talking about—and why should it be?—but it is no less illuminating just to listen to him talk about it:

Indeed you are the balls of the
      bullock and the calls of the
      peacock; you are the pony in
      the paddock near the bullock
      and the peacock; you are the
      futtock on the keel and the
      fetlock (or the heel) of the
      pony in the paddock

If the things he wonders about make for at least a handful of great lines, the way he wonders about them is just as entertaining. “What a life you must have had,” he speculates in “Dear Housefly,” “swirled in the breath of running dogs / your eyes domed and numerous / as the basilicas of Carthage.” “What ceremony of light played with Sabrina / in his mind! Is he dead yet? Is it night?” he asks in “Richard Wilbur,” another title that is as entertainingly ludicrous as the poem itself.

            Sometimes all the fun Gudding has seems to exhaust him and force a lazy or comparatively uninspired attempt at another chuckle, as when he notes “I am averse to urine / yet I shake your hand upon / occasion” in the book’s title poem, or concludes “Fons Belli,” a poem in which the speaker removes from his anus, among other fantastic wonders, a robinet, a manganum and a calabra, with the tossed-off and terribly predictable “Thank God / for enemas.”

            But these few lapses in intensity only show how difficult it is to do what Gudding is doing, and if the humor in “Poem Imploring the Return of My Butt” seems utterly pointless, perhaps it because a kind of inspired pointlessness is the point, and I’m loving nearly every word of it.