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Scintillating new work from a celebrated contemporary poet.
Runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2004)
Runner-up for the ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Award (2003)
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.
World in a Skirt
Goner's Boner
Fido, Jolted by Jove
Significant Suspicions
Fourth of July B.C.
Unhygienic Song
Letters Numbers Signs Words Referred to as Words
Boy Thing
The Magic Cube
Impolitic
The Retort Room
Sampling
Lectator's Song
Far Sight
Iquity - Four Commissions - Songs for Scientists Parts I and II
Song for the Men of the Pennsylvania Hills
Song for a Mountain Climber
Mankind's Pet the Copycat - Four Poems after the Chinese - After Su Tung P'o
After Li Bai
After Wang Wei
After Su Tung P'o - Two Tunes for Elliott - Affinity Welled
One's Mons - Back to B.C.
Night Storm
Mind's Eye
A Dearth in the Dreamboat Department
Voicebox
Pound Sign
Long Shot with Shutter
Settling Song
Through (after Sully Prudhomme)
Blind Men (after Charles Baudelaire)
Out of Eyeshot
The Suicide (After Jorge Luis Borges)
The Looker
Notes
About the Author
The author of six previous books of poetry, including National Book Award finalist Hinge & Sign (Wesleyan, 1993), HEATHER MCHUGH teaches in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and since 1984 at the University of Washington in Seattle. She takes time off in Maine.
"This is a sort of poignancy possible only through the striking together of profound sadness with tough humor... McHugh's rigorous experiments with language give these poems the feel of tightly coiled springs in their precision and energy."
~Jessica Garratt, Austin Chronicle
""... McHugh here returns to her own signature bravura and obsessive word play, focusing on the struggle of eye and mind, brain and body, to mediate the exacting details of an exquisitely overwrought world... probing language in a way that enhances (and seems inextricably linked to) scientific inquiry...""
~Publishers Weekly
""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 York Times Book Review
""This is a sort of poignancy possible only through the striking together of profound sadness with tough humor McHugh's rigorous experiments with language give these poems the feel of tightly coiled springs in their precision and energy.""
~Jessica Garratt, Austin Chronicle
""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.""
~Robert Hass, Washington Post Book World
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