From Publishers Weekly
Bright rhythms, pointed rhymes and dazzling surfaces distinguish McHugh's poems, which tease their language to the ends of wit: "I tell you outright,/I'm a neitherer. But what are you? You are a bother." McHugh's sixth collection follows her new and selected Hinge & Sign (a National Book Award finalist), and continues her pithily specific explorations of general human conditions: being, thought, life, death, time. The opening "Not a Prayer" demands of the poet "every surge of language, every scrap and flotsam" she has at her command, as she searches for meaning in the death of a septuagenarian, mother-like figureA"a nomen always aiming/ for amen." In the title poem, the "Father" visits each "Predicament" at night, like a parent checking sleeping children, "train[ing] us in the virtues we most lacked." Her M?bius strip-like sentences double back on seemingly obvious meanings and sound patterns ("To what high end/ the spondee's spasm"), daring us to give up on them. Yet the jokes work to draw us in. She writes of a bather's poitrine: "This was mesmer/ to terrify mortals: and so/ from the calm corroborate tubworlds/ she climbed out, bore her own dead weight again, took on the old/ mundane emergency: the world/ at large, its separations/ hefted." The construction of such poems, and of the opening tour de force, displays McHugh's Dickinsonian, saving restlessness: she can't stop looking for self-undermining meanings within the clearest of statements. McHugh's best poems are both comic and profound: their depth comes from the belly laugh of the Medusa. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
National Book Award finalist McHugh tackles caregiving for a dying relative, the moon, love, the self, sex, and subjects not readily discernible in poems that focus too much on wordplay and too little on emotion. At times her work moves toward parody, as in "Neither Brings Charges": "When someone barks out/ Author! authorAthinking thinking's/ in the wings, however far the furor goes/ no star will come: only a fever." "Not a Prayer," a long poem about a relative's death, has some nice moments: "The dining room's become/ a mill of business, wheel of paperwork and news./ In short, it has become the outside world." Mentioned too in this poem is the title phrase: "The father of the/ predicaments, wrote Aristotle's translator, is being." McHugh is a modernist and an extremely cerebral poet, so these poems will not please everyone, but readers interested in language poetry will find poems of interest here. For academic collections and libraries where McHugh has a following.ADoris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


New York Times Book Review
"If McHugh is serious, she is anything but grim; with all her punning, bantering and mock scolding of herself . . . she brightens the shadowy corners of her world with verbal pyrotechnics . . . Most contemporary poems ask to be reread, and these insist on it. McHugh's antecedents include Rilke, Cioran, Beckett and the author of the knottier passages of Revelations. All of her lines are demanding, especially her last lines -- puzzling yet provocative, they're like little switches that flip at the end, sending the reader back into the poet's maze of words."


The New Yorker
" 'No word can clear itself' in this accomplished volume of poems, which illuminates how the contradictions and dualities concealed in language both betray and redeem us . . . McHugh emerges as a kind fo seer, and her striking conceits and crackling rhythms reveal an intellect that is often as sensuous as it is clever."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Heather McHugh takes her cue from Aristotle, who wrote that "the father of the predicaments is being." For McHugh, being is intimately, though not ultimately, bound to language, and these poems cut to the quick, delivering their revelations with awesome precision.

SYNOPSIS

Whether sorrowful or sassy, the poems in this new collection bear McHugh's signature: a lively love for the very language she bewares.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Bright rhythms, pointed rhymes and dazzling surfaces distinguish McHugh's poems, which tease their language to the ends of wit: "I tell you outright,/I'm a neitherer. But what are you? You are a bother." McHugh's sixth collection follows her new and selected Hinge & Sign (a National Book Award finalist), and continues her pithily specific explorations of general human conditions: being, thought, life, death, time. The opening "Not a Prayer" demands of the poet "every surge of language, every scrap and flotsam" she has at her command, as she searches for meaning in the death of a septuagenarian, mother-like figure--"a nomen always aiming/ for amen." In the title poem, the "Father" visits each "Predicament" at night, like a parent checking sleeping children, "train[ing] us in the virtues we most lacked." Her M bius strip-like sentences double back on seemingly obvious meanings and sound patterns ("To what high end/ the spondee's spasm"), daring us to give up on them. Yet the jokes work to draw us in. She writes of a bather's poitrine: "This was mesmer/ to terrify mortals: and so/ from the calm corroborate tubworlds/ she climbed out, bore her own dead weight again, took on the old/ mundane emergency: the world/ at large, its separations/ hefted." The construction of such poems, and of the opening tour de force, displays McHugh's Dickinsonian, saving restlessness: she can't stop looking for self-undermining meanings within the clearest of statements. McHugh's best poems are both comic and profound: their depth comes from the belly laugh of the Medusa. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal