Heather McHugh Books

The two things you should know about Heather McHugh's "Eyeshot" are that it can be difficult to understand what many of her phrases and even entire poems mean at first glance, and that it can be very rewarding when you do get into them, rereading them five, ten times, and start sorting everything out. McHugh deals with language in a number of different ways (she considers sounds, etymology, idiomatic phrasing, slang, techno-speak, and more) and often brings up multiple language issues at once. In addition, she is actively obscuring pieces of her poem, like the strict iambic meter and the concrete details. So what she ends up with are formal poems telling narrative stories or capturing real images, but hidden away behind free-verse explorations of words and wordplay, and the reader must work to figure everything out. And it can be hard work indeed. But, since McHugh excels not only in both of these modes of writing, but in the marrying of them together, it can be very satisfying once the words and images start falling into place. As other reviewers have mentioned, images and themes of eyes and sight are covered throughout the book, and this adds an additional challenge: once you start solving the puzzles of the individual poems, you can begin to consider how they relate to each other.

Two of the more accessible poems in the book are "Goner's B*ner" and "The Retort Room," which feature McHugh's signature style in phrases like "Is it a mistake / or a misgiving?" and "past eking out, past aching in," and I would recommend that a reader new to her writing start there.

Eyeshot is a collection of free-verse poetry. The common theme of the wide range of human blindness - from literally being unable to see to willfully refusing to see what lies before one - permeates these often dark verses, sometimes brooding and anxious, sometimes laced with black humor. "Through" (After Sully Prudhomme) In blue or black, all lovely and beloved, / Some countless human eyes have seen the dawn. / They're sleeping at the bottom of the grave. / Here comes the sun. // But far more delicately than the days / The nights ignite in countless eyes a spark. / The stars are always sending out their rays: / Eyes fill with dark. // That they should lose their glimmer, one and all- / No way. It simply isn't possible. / I say they've turned toward the side we call / Invisible. // And like the stars that must incline to set / They too are somewhere out there in the sky; / The eye-lights may go down at times and yet / They do not die. // All lovely or beloved, in black and blue, / To any dawn's immensities disposed / On earth's far side they're seeing through / The lids we closed.

Eyeshot. Earshot. Snapshot. I shot. Eyes shot. eYes... hot. Heather McHugh's latest book is--aye--hot. Written toward a readership as enamored with language as she, Eyeshot (exa)mines language at the level beneath ordinary diction for its twinkling possibilities, its intersections, its coincidences. McHugh's poetry recognizes (and flowers forth from) root alphabetic patterns and cadences in the music of her own speech: puns, anagrams, homonyms, iambs, internal and end rhymes, words spelled backwards that make other words, words contained within other words, words suggested by other words. Pupils. Blind dates. An "eye-gulp" (seen in a flash as "eye-plug"). As lush and seductive as the "purple burning overspill[ing]/ the porch-side torches of the lilac," McHugh's voice at once defies boundaries and leverages traditional form to accentuate sound, sight, and meaning.

In fact, she seems just as interested in what the eye and ear can do with language--how they receive and process linguistic information through distortion, dissection, truncation, and recombination--as with the understandings that emanate organically from such radically experimental seeing and hearing. Her poems are not self-consciously epiphanic, rather exploratory, inquisitive, ironic, and progressive in the most literal sense: that is, they arrive at meaning through a progression of linguistic play and connections. For example, the simple phrase "You're your/ own owner, no?" opens into much more than a cute case of phonic repetition and reversal, where the ghosted "know"--do you know yourself?--inherits its semantic weight from the visual and aural convergences in these two lines.

While many of her poems deal seriously with such themes as love, displacement, and death, humor is the overarching characteristic that sustains McHugh's elaborate project: "Somebody spell us! Help!" Accident and absurdity seem to govern her universe. Bird calls are deciphered in the most outlandish ways: "Potato chips!", "Who cooks for you?" and "Quick, quick, give me the raincheck!" And who else would address a brain in a jar, outrageously, as "O single-minded/ one!" Still, McHugh's work remains grounded in poignant moments of arrival, where "on the one hand... in the scheme of things we matter/ marvelously little; on the other,... we are// the scheme of things."

McHugh's "Eyeshot" is a jungle of puns, double-entendres, triple-phrase-turns and bizarre zingers. Its title alone announces the kind of humorous (though not exactly light-hearted) indeterminacy McHugh sets whirring to get her through each poem. This book is as entertaining and admirable an example of linguistic bootstrapping as any, as in "Iquity": "No need for misery: in cine-pop / a little extra nookie on the side; in cine-mom your / hubbie hurries home. (Hi, hon.) Your honor, honest, / is not implicated. Soothers / must, by definition, say / no terrifying truths." All McHugh needs to jump into higher gears is her ear and/or dictionary.

Few books of "serious" poetry inspire outright laughter, but be prepared for numerous outbursts: "I pray / this baby we are seeing walloped, wiped and winningly anointed, / turns out dumb as oakum-and more sinister. That way / he can crown a tranquil life by being / appoined a cabinet minister." ("After Su Tung P'o") McHugh is masterful at dropping in rhymes at just the right moment, and her aural/verbal play never takes a breather, much less a breath: "My one / and only: money / minus one. No noun / like a pronoun!-best of all / the jealous kind. Come, come, / company doll, cide with a coin, / one moan, one / more, honey / bunch." ("The Magic Cube") This is a poet for whom the materiality and cross-pollination of words is an endlessly amusing miracle.

Yet McHugh is equally in love with sight: "Years I poured it forth, without / a thought. To left and right / I sprayed the wide world's / spectacle. I made a blue / bird sparkle, and a red tree" ("Out of Eyeshot"). The blur of senses, the blur of seeing, and the blur of being form the central concern of this book. McHugh finds nothing so serious, either: "Downline, it's not / our substance pours away: / it is our shine." ("Mind's Eye"); "The world / itself is worried. Trees stand out, spectacularly / branched: the mind's eye grows alert: this thing / could hurt." ("Fido, Jolted by Jove") Perception shapes reality-and this cliché sheds its banality in McHugh's deft leaps. Not often does one encounter a book of poetry so saturated with exuberance, for language or for living.

Heather McHugh, Eyeshot (Wesleyan, 2003)

The best thing about Eyeshot is Heather McHugh's amazing use of language; it's like reading John M. Bennett without the dyslexia and cut-up/fold-in stuff. McHugh has one of the strongest senses of rhythm, both in formal and free verse, I've come across in quite a while, and it usually manifests itself without drawing attention to the form (in those poems where one exists in this collection; the forms here are usually on the loose side anyway), an amazing achievement in a time when formal poetry may not be dead, but is lying in hospice, suffocated by the weight of a million teen-angst poets who think sonnets are for sissies and have never heard the word "canzone." Read this. **** ½

Heather McHugh is a truly inspirational poet. I have just returned from hearing her read at the Getty Center in LA. What a marvelous experience. McHugh is a truly gifted manipulator of language, from its etemylogical roots, through its syntax, to its artful implimentation in finely wrought metaphors. She brazenly addresses plainly human issues -- sex, love, lust, pain, anger, joy, despair -- in terms that make them readily identifiable as the emotions you have felt but from a perspective slightly ajar to what you might have ever imagined. From hearing her speak, I can tell you she has an enviable mastery of the American language. My copy of "Hinge & Sign" is well worn from weeks of being my constant companion. I eagerly look forward to her new book.

Heather McHugh is one of the best living American poets, and this book shows you some of her finest pieces from the last 25 years. It also has a collection of new poems that both continue and deepen her earlier work.

Bouvier finds an ebullience and often amusement in ambivalence. No Hamlet is he, riddled with doubts. He gets above the ambivalences by a bright, sometimes almost mocking style. This obviously does not get to any answers, or even any ways out of the ambivalences. But it surely presents an unfamiliar, entertaining view on this common state. Bouvier can write, "If we touched hands, it was too much. We touched hands. It was not enough...We lost ourselves, we found a house. We found a house, we lost the house." ("The House In Order") He ends "Somebody Stop LaSalle, "To the left and right fantasies. Come amok with me." The insouciant style yields fetching, occasionally intriguing wordplay.

The beloved writer and editor Judith Moore used to recommend Geoff Bouvier's writing as a perfect balance of the spare and the sensual. When I heard that he had published a book of poetry to follow on the heels of his award winning chapbook, EVERYBODY HAD A HAT, I thought, "About time," for that book came out some years ago. Some of the "HAT" material shows up again in LIVING ROOM, the new and ample collection from Copper Canyon Press, but it is supplemented by so many new poems that what remains is only an impression which, in its new context, becomes merely one of a number of opening doors. Heather McHugh has contributed an introduction which got me a little bogged down, and eventually I abandoned it, not because she's an inadequate critic, nor because she is unenthusiastic about Bouvier's writing; no, it is merely that she has her own slant on things and I wanted my experience to Bouvier's writing to be free, at least, of that tendency.

So then why now am I giving my reactions? Well, for one thing, I'm afraid that books like Geoff Bouvier's fly under the radar and not enough people know of this unique work. He lives in San Diego, and he works outside the academy, so for many readers, he just doesn't exist. In "Not Pathetic Ebough Weather We're Having," he steps back from the scene described almost as a technician. "Read the trees' confusion," it begins, in what I take as an imperative, a voice ordering us to read. (But it might also be a slangy use of the past tense, the initial word 'I' omitted as in naturalistic speech, like "Went down to the store today.") His poems are so brief you could almost count the words, and such compression, like the great weight borne down on coal, that turns it to diamond, makes emphasis key. "A sun's frown's funny on warm orange pumpkins." What is with the article "A"? How many suns are there anyway--why not just say "The sun"? It's a suggestive method which Bouvier uses like a grandmaster, to divert us out of preconceived notions into a place where answers disguise themselves as executioners.

When the real "I" makes a belated entry into the poem, naturally I assume it's the real Geoff Bouvier. However the rules of modernism intervene, pulling at my sleeve, asking me to consider that, perhaps, just perhaps, this "I" is an authorial invention. "But I won't feel for it until winter worries away snow." The poem ends somewhere else, on a "field of sweaty February," far away from its vision of pumpkins hot, hot, hot. Just so are we transported, as readers, away from the page itself and into another space mental or physical. Now I'm getting more Heather McHugh than I wanted, but you get the general idea.

Formally innovative and metrically sound without being stuffy, wildly experimental in diction and voice while still being firmly rooted in the vernacular, Heather McHugh's poems are so luminescent they could shine in the dark, and Father of the Predicaments is no exception. An antidote to those who say poetry can't be challenging AND accessible at the same time. I'd also highly recommend picking up Hinge and Sign, her recent New and Selected.

This seller was quick in getting the book out to me. Product was as advertised.

Heather McHugh writes more delightful and profound poems in Shades. Her main concerns seem to be time and language, drawing from relationships. She often pulls in unexpected parallels, and she also tightens things together by playing with similar sounds.

One example: In "Inflation" (page 25) she compares language to money and moving pictures. ("Language wasn't any / funny money I was playing with, / no toy surprise" and "But now I'm dumb / to frame the stream / of stills I feel" and, touching them together, "a bill of silver senselessness--the seconds counted / in the hundreds, in the thousands, in the billions, till the till")

It gave me great pleasure to read this book and I recommend it.

A work that may speak to some more than to others; still it has a range endemic of effeminate.

I bought this book of poetry and it was not even above average. So, I looked it up on Amazon.com and came across a reviewer who keeps defending this book and saying negitive things about the other reviewers. Do not listen to this lone reviewer! The poetry in this book is boring, disconnected in its content, and not at all "cutting-edge". If this book was so great, Hume would have quickly had another book published, which never happened.

The US poetry scene is alive and vibrant.

Clearly someone has a chip on his/her shoulder (see previous 3 reviews). Such is the nature of poetic communities. Musca Domestica is not for everybody. The book does not deliver home-spun anecdotes across flat prose 'lines.' It is, nonetheless, a very strong piece of poetic work with an uncommonly wide range of appeal. With some intellectual and emotional moxie, even fans of Dobyns/Dunn (I think they're the same dude) should be able to find real power here. Afficionados of the deeper American tradition (Stevens, Whitman, Dickinson) will find nothing here not to like.

I wrote one of the first reviews of Musca Domestica on Amazon.com, and am revisiting the site with the knowledge that Christine Hume's next book, Alaskaphrenia, has won the Green Rose Prize and will be published by New Issues in 2004.

Many of the negative reviews of Musca Domestica stem from misconceptions.

Several reviewers have complained that there is no emotion to Hume's poetry, implying that a work must be emotional to be poetic. The implied point is debatable, but let's clear the air and say that her work IS largely intellectual. If you are looking for accessible poetry, this is not the book to choose. If you are looking for the avant-garde, poetry that requires several readings, or poetry that specifically tries to deconstruct linguistic norms, THEN you should choose Musca Domestica.

Regarding two points made by a recent reviewer: that the book is disconnected in content and that, if it was great, Hume would have immediately followed it with another. First of all, the book is tightly bound by a thematic/linguistic link: the use of the fly imagery. Another reviewer even lamented this fact, claiming that it leaves little room for originality (leaving me to wonder what that reviewer thinks of formal constraints such as sonnets, quatrains, etc). The opening poem is essentially a list of definitions and phrases associated with the word fly. Virtually all the poems in the book play in some way or another with this word, and even those that deviate from a strict link are still bound by the haphazard nature of a fly's path. I repeat, the path is not narrative but thematic. Secondly, the majority of poets do not operate on a publishing scale like Stephen King. As a general rule, the ones who turn out books of poetry by the handful are self- or vanity-published and very elementary (read: Hallmark verse). There is no timeline which a poet must stick to in order to be "good."

The last point is one that several reviewers have already made: Modern vs. Postmodern. Hume is primarly a Postmodern poet. I won't take umbrage with the reviewers who dislike Postmodernism as a whole; that is their perogative. But please, don't disparage Hume for not writing like a Modernist. Apples to oranges.

Whether you're going to praise or condemn Musca Domestica (and I continue to praise it), please do so on its own merits and place within Poetry.

I know a reader-review should respond to the book itself, and not the comments of the other reviewers, but this recent batch of negative reviews are so wildly off the mark that they beg correction. I don't know what these readers are thinking, but it seems to me like they either haven't read 'Musca Domestica' or simply lack the faculties to read it fairly.

In any case, potential buyers, don't be discouraged by these nonsensical reviews. 'Musca Domestica' is an incredibly rewarding book: the poems are only difficult in the way that the most intriguing and beautiful puzzles are difficult. These poems reward in every way: Ms. Hume manages to be funny and poignant and provoactive and weird all at once, and the more time you spend with this book the more delightful it becomes.

Give 'Musca Domestica' a try -- the poems have earned it, and the book will richly repay your attention!

And to you 'readers' in the one-star crowd: snap out of it, kids.

As Publisher's Weekly said Popov and McHugh "don't present the German texts en face, a practice they regard, in their preface, as a potential distraction from the reader's experience of their renderings. It would indeed be a distraction, making painfully clear just how far they depart from the originals to arrive at their idiosyncratic versions"

I don't know any German and even I could tell something was fishy. For example, for the poem on page 5, Popov and McHugh state that the German word "neige" means "remainder", "end" or "dregs". They select none of these choices for their translation and because there is no facing German it took me 10 minutes to find what word they did use. (I think it is "neighing" because neige "moves in the nearness" of the english word neigh.)

The endnotes are truly Kinbotian. Celan's late poems resist meaning, but not to Popov and McHugh. They understand it all.

It is sad that this book won the 2001 Griffin International Prize for poetry. Luckily, Amazon has a good deal on a four-volume set of Paul Celan's poetry, including Breathturn, Threadsuns and Lightduress, translated by Pierre Joris which I will move into nearness as soon as it is released.

This is a superb collection of poems by one of the world's truly great poets. This is one of the better translations I've read with the authors doing an admirable job of turning Celan's German into a very readable English that still manages to capture Celan's haunting style.

I was incredibly disappointed in this work. The selection of poems as "best" in America in 2007 was stunning in its mediocrity, and even outright poverty. If these are truly the best poems in America, we really are in trouble. I have never written a review before but this terrible book just made me want to cry out in protest.

i was -pleased with the quick delivery and goon condition of the product thanks don

The poetry that's getting published these days is poorly crafted and underwhelming; this compilation is no exception.

Yes, I think The American Poetry Review is a great publication, but to include five of its poems in this book is ridiculous considering how many other fine publications are out there. I could have also made the same remark about the number of poems selected from Sentence or POOL. She also includes two poems from the same author twice! Now I'm certain there are so many talented poets out there, that she didn't need to resort to this. It must be a great honor to edit this publication and if her heart wasn't in it, she should have passed it along to someone who would actually work hard to read as many poems from as many authors in as many publications as possible.

I've found many of the BAP series to be highly dissapointing. But it is hard to select a best of when it comes to poetry. It really depends on what you like to read. Now, there are some truly awful poems in here, and I'm not sure McHugh was the best choice as an editor, but she really picked some great poems. Sure about a quarter of them are awful, but most are readable or good. And then there are the great ones: Geffrey Brock, Galway Kinnell, Marya Rosenberg, David Shumate, Brian Turner, Charles Harper Webb and Joe Wenderoth. If you love poetry, you've gotta get this one.