Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English literature. In this essay, he considers "Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead" in terms of many levels of gaps or distances: between the generations, between faith and doubt, and between belief and agnosticism or atheism.

Hudgins's reputation as a poet has been built in part on his concern with religion, especially the kind of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity that has a strong hold in the southern United States, where Hudgins spent much of his adolescence and early adulthood. Many of his most admired poems contain what Clay Reynolds describes in Dictionary of Literary Biography as a "sense of the grotesque," in which the reader is often shocked by horrific, morbid, or bizarre images intended to point attention to "the relationship between real behavior and religious conviction."

In many of Hudgins's poems, the poet steps outside accepted attitudes to biblical...