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."


Washington Post Book World
"Her writing is so alert to itself, so alert to language, it's like watching a dancer on a mirrored floor, stepping on her steps. She's practically playing with her words as she writes them down. 'Joycean' is the word that comes to mind . . . This kind of writing could seem like pure playfulness, but in McHugh it rarely does . . . She's a poet for whom wit is a form of spiritual survival."


Newsday
"McHugh's terse and deeply intelligent poems teach the virtues of wit, curiosity, patience and attention. Like Rilke and Celan, McHugh makes a poem into a storehouse of predicaments-a field of compound and divided meanings never synthesized or resolved . . . McHugh uses paradox and equivocation to quarry and refine hard truths from the vernacular: that living is dying, that the mind has only itself to know itself. McHugh's poems are not flights from these truths but honest and often humorous efforts to bear them."


Seattle Times
"Heather McHugh is one of the brightest of the Pacific Northwest's literary jewels . . . These poems slide like quicksilver in and out of one's grasp, playful and provocative . . . McHugh's elusive, allusive language is the fitting instrument for knowing a world that is equally unsettled . . . McHugh's poems offer the constant delight of words and worlds made new. The Father of the Predicaments stands as a remarkable achievment of contemporary poetry."


Book Description
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 Publisher
6 x 9 trim. LC 99-14234


About the Author
HEATHER MCHUGH is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English at the University of Washingotn in Seattle. She also regularly reaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson college, near Ashville, N.C. She is the author of five books of poetry: Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993(Wesleyan, 1994), Shades (Wesleyan, 1988), To the Quick (Wesleyan, 1987) A World of Difference (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), and Dangers (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). She has translated three volumes of poetry: Because the Sea Is Black: Poems by Blaga Dimitrova (with co-translator Nikolai Popov, Wesleyan, 1989), D'Apres Tout: Poems by Jean Fallain (Princeton, 1982), and Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (with co-translator Nikolai Popov, Wesleyan, 2000). In 1993, Wesleyan published her literary essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality. Her version of Euripides' Cyclops (with an introduction by David Konstan) is forthcoming in a new series from Oxford University Press. Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993 was named a finalist for the national Book Award in 1994. Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan won the Griffin Prize in 2001. In 1999 she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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