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A renowned poet's artful collection. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Sculptor of the American language
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 etemylogicalroots, through its syntax, to its artful implimentation in finely wroughtmetaphors.She brazenly addresses plainly human issues -- sex, love, lust,pain, anger, joy, despair -- in terms that make them readily identifiableas the emotions you have felt but from a perspective slightly ajar to whatyou might have ever imagined.From hearing her speak, I can tell you shehas an enviable mastery of the American language. My copy of "Hinge& Sign" is well worn from weeks of being my constant companion.Ieagerly look forward to her new book.

A first-rate selection from a brilliant poet.
Heather McHugh is one of the best living American poets, and this bookshows you some of her finest pieces from the last 25 years.It also has acollection of new poems that both continue and deepen her earlier work. ... Read more

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A leading American poet reclaims the realm of criticism in distinctive and impassioned readings of poems and other works of art. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

broken - and still english
I cannot explain this, but the first time I read these essays I did not understand anything about them.The second time I started at the beginning again, and they were as clear as a bell!!
Intriguing, clever, thought-provoking, imaginative. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

Not serious enough
If the situation of our poets is utterly desperate - way too much competition and no readerly love - that of our critics is essentially awkward. How to keep saying that something is just not that good, when it's not downright awful, without seeming cranky or boring everyone? In my defense, let me say that I'm definitely not cranky. Contemporary American poetry is really not that good! I love lots of poetry, and there's much poetry to love; it happens though that our literature currently suffers from a crisis of mediocrity; we have failed the modernists, that great generation of American poets, utterly.

Ok, on to McHugh and this book in particular. For me, these poems strike such an odd balance of the horrific and the whimsical that the effect is incoherent and jarring. The poet obviously delights in the quirky sounds that words make, but superficial aural effects (I'm not saying that aural effects cannot be deep, significant and devastating) totally carry the poems away. Too often one gets the sense that words are chosen for their phonetic proximity, without much regard for their intrinsic and connotative qualities. Consider the following:

For me each item's a line item,
each occasion an occasion for redress,
reclaiming, recompense, or rue...

That last word really gives me pause; blunt alliteration is the cause, but the effect, I think you will agree, is quite jarring. This heavy-handed use of sound is evident throughout.

McHugh is best, I think, when she can manage to actually be light, which is seldom. "Domestique" makes the exact reversal of a common situation into a rather charming, if still very slight, occasional piece - the poet is enslaved to life's tasks, while her pet dog looks on in aloof amusement, like a real poet. More often, the penchant for bad jokes and lame puns *will* make you groan. Take the atrocious quip on Catholic priests - it's so not funny it's the opposite of funny. Or the one called "Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies," which coos at the felicities of tech-speak - it's grandma's humor for sure. Or yet the one in the voice of a lusty granny - yikes!

Elsewhere, when the poet isn't totally amused with herself, these poems speak in the language of wonder and easy wisdom that are a mainstay of a certain kind of tastefully produced books of poetry. (I keep marveling at the excellent design and construction of these books of poems that I can't bear to chuck out the window.) Couch potatoes are fine, one poem declares, while studious hermits are ticking time-bombs - which gets things precisely backwards, in my opinion. To top it all, all manners of horror, from universal violence to living death and damnation, are constantly being thrown in.

... here at god's own
Earth Day barbecue we are

the blackest sheep.

It's the combination of hopeless guilt and manic, wide-eyed wonder that is so disturbing to me. Two stars because every now and then a line or phrase strikes me as original and promising. I cannot recommend the book or any single poem, however.

Oh, and if you're wondering what, then, you are supposed to read - may I recommend the classics, from Milton to Blake to O'Hara to early Ashbery, etc. Or try one of those knock-out foreign poets that are not too often mentioned in America, like Dario or Montale or Leopardi, etc. Get a bilingual edition and discover the glories of stunning sense married to gorgeous images married to seductive sound all anew.

Offering a storm of new insights through fine and deft verse
With twelve previous volumes to her credit, Heather McHugh is a prolific poet of quality. "Upgraded to Serious" is her newest collection, offering a storm of new insights through her fine and deft verse than will make people laugh as they think. "Upgraded to Serious" is a top pick, especially for fans of her previous volumes. "Myrrha to the Source": O fluent one, O muscle full of hydrogen,/O stuff of grief, whom the Greeks accuse of spoiling souls,//whose destiny is downward,/whose reflecting's up -- I think/I must have come from you.//Just one more cup.

A Brain Upgrade
Heather McHugh proves, yet again with Upgraded to Serious, that she is an American genius, most deserving of her recent MacArthur Genuis Award. The poems in this latest collection tend toward the hermetic, and are difficult at times to unravel. Not to say that a reader's intellect shouldn't be greatly challenged, but at times when I was reading this collection, I felt I needed a serious brain upgrade in order to fully comprehend some of the work. That's certainly not McHugh's problem, and I think, like Paul Celan before her (especially his late work), she fully intends to keep the reader involved and muddling through the mysteries of language and the overwhelming mysteries of human existence.

Poetry for Prosers
It would be a wonder to start a story with the words "Inside the zygote..." then leap a line below to utter "...something's simmering." How much more a wonder would it be to end the book with, "Sideways it angled, and shone up." (?) This is what McHugh does to a reader in this book of poems, gathers her voltaic pulse and lets us see it spark through its biology, first line to the last. Even we simple readers of prose find her book infinitely engaging; it is filled with visible God "He's a hoot, with his flips of the nickel," filled with her laughing, punning verse, "and wetware lives in meatspace." And filled with her careful reminders of all our human beauties all encased and illuminated in her unique language. She says,

For me each item's a line item,
each occasion an occasion for redress,
reclaiming, recompense, or rue.

No story could have a better intent, or find itself better wrought. This book shows how to write it, perceive it, and in the end, see its wisdom. A true beauty, this book of poems.
... Read more

Product Description
Hammer and Blaze provides a true cross-section of the best contemporary poets writing in North America today. Editors Ellen Bryant Voigt and Heather McHugh have brought together the work of sixty poets who have taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, one of the most respected and influential writing programs of its kind.

The stellar group of contributors includes MacArthur fellows Campbell McGrath, Anne Carson, Edward Hirsch, Eleanor Wilner, Susan Stewart, and Lucia Perillo. Also represented here are works by Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Dunn and Louise Glück; Ruth Lilly Prize winner Carl Dennis; and Robert Wrigley, Thomas Lux, and B. H. Fairchild, winners of the Kingsley Tufts Award. From the couplets of Pablo Medina to the neoclassical lyricisms of Carl Phillips, this anthology appropriately reflects the cross-cultural nature of contemporary North American poetry with its most diverse and prestigious voices. A number of the poems are previously unpublished, including work by Joan Aleshire, Stuart Dischell, Stephen Dobyns, Stephen Dunn, Roland Flint, Carol Frost, Barbara Greenberg, Edward Hirsch, Pablo Medina, Steve Orlen, Gregory Orr, Kathleen Peirce, Kenneth Rosen, Daniel Tobin, Alan Williamson, and Eleanor Wilner.

Hammer and Blaze, a gathering of our best poets, should garner attention from the literary world at large as well as from students of contemporary poetry and creative writing. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

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

Product Description
The twentieth edition of The Best American poetry series celebrates the rich and fertile landscape of American poetry. Renowned poet Heather McHugh loves words and the unexpected places they take you; her own poetry elevates wordplay to a species of metaphysical wit. For this year's anthology McHugh has culled a spectacular group of poems reflecting her passion for language, her acumen, and her vivacious humor.

From the thousands of poems published or posted in one year, McHugh has chosen seventy-five that fully engage the reader while illustrating the formal and tonal diversity of American poetry. With new work by established poets such as Louise Glück, Robert Hass, and Richard Wilbur, The Best American Poetry 2007 also features such younger talents as Ben Lerner, Meghan O'Rourke, Brian Turner, and Matthea Harvey.

Graced with McHugh's fascinating introduction, the anthology includes the ever-popular notes and comments section in which the contributors write about their work. Series editor David Lehman's engaging foreword limns the necessity of poetry. The Best American Poetry 2007 is an exciting addition to a series committed to covering the American poetry scene and delivering great poems to a broad audience.

... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

a few pleasures
To Heather McHugh's credit, she's up front in her introduction about what criteria and biases she brings to her selections of the "best" in American Poetry.But that doesn't save the collection from being eminently disappointing.As many others have noted, this is a series of poems that play with sounds (I know, that sounds redundant)--but then it's not much more than that.The formula seems to be: 1) sing some sounds to yourself; 2) when they take the shape of words, write them down; 3) make big margins; 4) publish poem in BAP 2007.("I met the Duck and Duckess of Windsor," Frederick Seidel writes in a typical line from the book.)Some of this is quirky and fun, but after a while it grows tedious and even makes you wonder how original any of this material is if it all sounds so much the same.Each year's collection requires an entire reading to find the gems, but this edition requires much more work than usual.Ultimately it's worth it--there's three or four poems that will please you--but the series editors really need to be more responsible about what they call the book.Granted we will never solve the formula for "best," but "Poems Heather Likes" would be much more accurate.

Horrible
I don't need to say anything else.Wish I could get my money and time back.

Surface and depth
I assisted a stoneworker once in the construction of a foundation. From a large pile of stones he was adept at quickly finding those which the wall required, the shape of substance equal to the shape of absence, soon filled. He said it was largely a matter of having scanned the available material and letting his unconscious mind direct him to a conscious, and mostly correct, choice. Of course, in using language, we do something similar, swiftly rummaging through the word hoard for the thing we wish to say, hoping it will be solid, and something to build on. Heather McHugh delves into thematter itself, its interstices, gaps, and echoes, and into the material of what we mean, and are often unconscious of. The effect can be disquieting, calling the solid into question, shaking the foundation. Attention and alertness are required to read her work, and they are also the reward.The fort in comfort falls, and sometimes, in the landscape that was blocked, the delight of uncertainty and insecurity is revealed, if we are willing to stand it.
So I think McHugh selected poems for the Best American Poetry 2007 with something like this in mind. Are all of them best, or even better? Probably not. Some require more unraveling than I have patience for, some are indulgent, others seek to dazzle but tend to dizzy. That said, I have found the best way to read the book is here and there, now and then, to let accidents have their way with me. "Only surfaces interest me," writes Amit Majmudar in one of my favorite poems. "What depths I sound I sound by accident". But accidents, I think McHugh would agree, and the apparently random, favor the awakened mind.

Some poems are interesting.Most are dull.
There are a few poems in this book that are worth reading-- Milton Kessler's "Comma of God," for example-- but most of them are forgettable or nauseating.Some of the poems are so irritating or inept (or both) that you'll want to shove the book into the shredder.More irritating than the poems, though, is the section that contains the contributors' comments.Here's a sample by Thomas Fink: "By entertaining varied perspectives on interpersonal and intergroup conflict and by disrupting continuity between successive sentences, 'Yinglish Strophes IX,' I hope, foregrounds heterogeneous linguistic elements rather than an individual 'voiceprint.'"

If that's your thing, go buy this book.

Truly unimpressive
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. ... Read more

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

Customer Reviews (1)

Wonderful predicaments
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 inthe dark, and Father of the Predicaments is no exception. An antidote tothose 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 andSelected. ... Read more

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Reads as friend's revelations of most intimate moments
A work that may speak to some more than to others; still it has a range endemic of effeminate. ... Read more

Product Description
Paul Celan s widely recognized as the greatest and most studied post-war European poet. At once demanding and highly rewarding, his poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This selection of poems, now available in paper for the first time, is comprised of previously untranslated work, opening facets of Celan's oeuvre never before available to readers of English. These translations, called "perfect in language, music, and spirit" by Yehuda Amichai, work from the implied premise of what has been called Intention auf die Sprache, delivering the spirit of Celan's work--his dense multilingual resonances, his brutal broken music, syntactic ruptures and dizzying wordplay. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Thoughtless
I agree with the previous review. I've read Hamburger's translations before, and will get that book now instead. This is really distorted stuff; and frankly I think it's crass, to inflict on another's poems so much of your own invention. I'm writing this to warn those who might consider buying this for the Celan.

what publisher's weekly said above
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.

An Astounding book
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. ... Read more

Product Description
Heather McHugh's new book, Eyeshot, is a brooding, visionary work that takes aim at the big questions--those of love and death. The poems suggest that such immensities balance on the smallest details, and that a range of human blindness is inescapable.

The power of this new work comes from its delicate yet tenacious fidelity to the ever-unfolding senses of sense. The poems invite the reader to follow careening words and insights through passages both playful and profound. Her "Fido, Jolted by Jove" reveals the tension endemic to both language and living: "the world itself is worried." Yet the same poem remarks the high price of any reductive fix: "a brain this insecure may need another bolt be driven in it." This movement between anxiety and the human compulsion for order informs Eyeshot's darkly comic, 20/20 acuity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

No pain, no gain.
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.

"Only real/ love-moans, and wonders un-translatable"
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."

Randy Dandy
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.

A collection of free-verse poetry
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.

Awe-inspiring use of language.
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 ... Read more

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An exquisite series of poems that explore living and dying. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Another Pick for Puns and Play
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. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

A great book of poetry.
Very clever and wonderful poems.I had this writer for a workshop and he's brilliant in person.

I strongly recommend this book of poems for anyone that enjoys the clever phrase or image.

A Field of Sweaty February
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.

poems playing with ambivalence
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. ... Read more

Product Description
Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Under the general editorship of Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the play.

Brimming with lusty comedy and horror, this new version of Euripides' only extant satyr play has been refreshed with all the salty humor, vigorous music, and dramatic shapeliness available in modern American English.

Driven by storms onto the shores of the Cyclops' island, Odysseus and his men find that the Cyclops has already enslaved a company of Greeks. When some of Odysseus' crew are seized and eaten by the Cyclops, Odysseus resorts to spectacular stratagems to free his crew and escape the island. In this powerful work, prize-winning poet Heather McHugh and respected classicist David Konstan combine their talents to create this unusually strong and contemporary tragic-comedy marked by lively lyricism and moral subtlety. ... Read more

Product Description
Musca Domestica is the common housefly.And housefly is exactly the right metaphor for this poet:from the ordinary things of life--illegible postcards, a view of a hillside wind turbine, and the quiet day spent a home--Christine Hume's poems take flight into a realm of dizzying invention and abundance.This is poetry that rewards the reader's efforts with riches. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

Reviewing reviews- a 2nd look at Musca Domestica on Amazon
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.

DO NOT BE FOOLED - THIS BOOK STINKS!
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.

One of our finest young poets
The US poetry scene is alive and vibrant.

Who's Afraid of Christine Hume?
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.

are we all reading the same book?
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. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Heather McHugh, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1658 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Customer Reviews (1)

A neglected masterpiece
Broken Film: Poems

D'Apres Tout: poems by Jean Follain translated by Heather McHugh is quite simply a desert island book for anyone who wants to know why literary minimalism has a purpose.Follain would probably be shocked to be linked with minimalists, but he likewise never sat well with the surrealists.Most minimalism succeeds or founders on an immediate but limited path of associative analogy, but the best minimalism opens outward into a depth that bespeaks of poetic compression at its peak of perfection.Follain creates entire social systems, worlds, and dramas in 10 to 20 lines.Comparisons might be drawn, in English, to Thomas Hardy or Phillip Larkin but these fall short of Follain's genius for making the inanimate and non-human realms become present as things to be reckoned with.Hardy and Larkin show us how people interact with such things, but Follain makes things present in an ontological sense that I have never experienced in any other poet's poetry.
I have read other translations of Follain (I read no French) but
McHugh's translation of this book is the only one that I have creased, treasured, and come back to time and time again over almost 30 years.

I hope that Princeton or another publisher will re-issue this absolutely essential book so that more poets could see what it can be like to be humble, chaste, and brilliant. ... Read more