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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Only real/ love-moans, and wonders un-translatable", April 25, 2005
This review is from: Eyeshot (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)
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."
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Randy Dandy, April 18, 2005
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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Eye of the Storm, February 22, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Eyeshot (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)
Heather McHugh has always taught us to see differently, even when we didn't listen. These are her sexiest poems to date, touching in places ("Is love // only cupidity? (In a silver twist, / a spire's unfixed. Now it's a spear.)"), and downright baudy in others (I'll let you find those on your own). Her taste for word-play is inexhaustibly sophisticated and very often hilarious ("God, your zip code / keeps eluding me. Oh one, / oh one, oh one..."). If I didn't know better, I'd say I smelled a masterpiece. Heather McHugh, "[you] did what [I] / [wasn't] there to do. // [You] took my breath away."
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