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An exquisite series of poems that explore living and dying.
Shades is a book of shadow and light cast between trees and sun, between day and room, between life and death. It acknowledges endings as beginnings; it offers compassion and tenderness, searching for hope in the richness of nature; it seeks the same resources within the human being.
Heather McHugh's companion volume to To the Quick (Wesleyan 1987) continues the music and brilliance characteristic of her work but moves more deeply into the metaphysical. She writes in paradox, with serious wit and intensity, the crafted language of "stitches in hand and birds in time"; "We part/ before we part; indeed,/ we part before we meet…" She studies "going matched with coming." She begins with a series of elegies that bring sexuality and death into brutal juxtaposition. Living and dying are the occasions of these poems, the soul the ultimate concern. This poetry takes to heart the fundamental strangeness of being.
Heather McHugh is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. She regularly teaches at the low residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College. She is the author of six books of poetry, including Eyeshot, The Father of the Predicaments, and Shades. Eyeshot was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and her selected poems, Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 was a Nationalist Book Award Finalist. The translation Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan, a collaboration with her husband Nikolai Popov, won the Griffin International Prize. In 1993, Wesleyan published her literary essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality. McHugh's other books include a translation of Euripedes' Cyclops and of poems by Jean Follain, under the title D'Après Tout: Poems of Jean Follain. In 1999, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
"Beyond McHugh's quick wit and the ironic cast of these poems, is something new, a passionate voice that does not fear the dark, impenetrable places of the heart"
~AI
"Heather McHugh's articulate toughness is a very useful complement to the bedrock wisdom she also offersA rare delight."
~Robert Creely
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