Book Review: Readings

Eyeshot: Poems

Wesleyan University Press, 54 pp., $20

No matter how far you get from that introductory poetry workshop, you never quite forget the daunting, mysterious warning that goes something like this: "In poetry, every word must count." Reading Heather McHugh's new collection, Eyeshot, you realize that not only does every word count, but many of them in two or three directions at once. Language and an intelligent wit are at the foreground of these poems, which unabashedly embrace wordplay and rhythms you can really feel. They rollick through topics that span all the major concerns -- love, politics, God, death -- through the filter of minute sensory perceptions, largely visual -- and keep rollicking right on through the end.

The final poem, "The Looker," is told from the perspective of a woman recently dead, still witnessing the living: "I was a looker at last, head back, mouth wide/as in a heat or holler. (I had always looked/my best astonished.)" There is a "you" addressee (whom we take to be a loved one she had outlived), who appears in the first line of the poem and returns again only in the last line, to give us a sock in the gut: "Given the almost-clear, the near-/unclouded glass, I did what you/weren't there to do./I took my breath away." This is a sort of poignancy possible only through the striking together of profound sadness with tough humor. The result: a spark of humanity like no other.

McHugh's rigorous experiments with language give these poems the feel of tightly coiled springs in their precision and energy, in the strange turns and expansive line breaks, the verb-worthy verbs ("to lupine/whole innocent hillsides" and "to destinize your drift" are among my favorites). The danger of such a pace of language is that you are sent hurtling through more- and less-demanding lines alike, sometimes leaving one with the frustrated feeling of "not getting" an entire stanza, or, more rarely, the poem as a whole. Many of these poems aren't easy. Luckily, there is so much to delight in, you will want to read and reread these poems until, hopefully, their meanings become as lucid as the vigorous spirit that lies behind them. McHugh's generosity is large, but so is her dedication to the world's faceted complexities: "In a flash, in pure detail, mind-boggling/miles unfurl, each inch of the endless/world (out of no mere mean-/whiled sense of time) is/branded by eye on brainpan. Wow." This from a poem simply called "Night Storm."