The Father of the Predicaments

by Heather McHugh

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

Available now in paperback, The Father of the Predicaments is Heather McHugh's first book since Hinge & Sign was selected as a National Book Award finalist and chosen a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. In this witty and deeply felt collection, McHugh takes her cue from Aristotle, who wrote that "the father of the predicaments is being." For McHugh, being is intimately, though perhaps not ultimately, bound to language, and these poems cut to the quick, delivering their revelations with awesome precision

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Courtney LeBlanc]

from Moon and TV: "The moon right now // is measurably smaller than / the dead ape-baby's head. / But neither one can be revived, / however long it lolls / in earth's embrace."

from Sun Grounded in Sky-Pool: "Where would a self be best advised to look / for self-assurance? Where put emptiness? / How move the mind to awe, its best address? / Can wonder come to live (whose breath we took)?"

from Open Air: "Once it streamed / through dream- // shrines (unseen, / not untrue): voluptuous, the spleen // reddened at the thought - i.e. the shadow - of / ulteriority. The liver livened, love- // struck."

[Matthew]

Is McHugh's poetry too densely clever at points? Perhaps. But for me that wordplay is perfectly balanced with the book's heart, which tackles life and death issues (being with someone in their final moments, for example) with a genuine, accessible, artful sensitivity. I'm a fan.

Quite often I'd stop paying attention to the wordplay because I was too busy enjoying the musicality, the way the words sound when read aloud, how they would build on one another, bleed into each another, the cadence of every phrase. The fluidity of the sounds sometimes led to a fluidity of definition -- especially when a word had double-meaning or the syntax of a line led to a sudden change in direction -- but that seems wholly appropriate when you consider the mystery contained in some of the subject matter.

I'm really looking forward to reading her book on poetics next. Then, yeah-ah, she has plenty more chapbooks on my will-soon-read list.

[Kitty]

I have read and re-read with enjoyment the poems in this book, especially the opening 15 page poem, "Not a Prayer" where McHugh weaves voices of narrator, her beloved aphasic teacher about to die, and her teacher's family, inner monologues. A collection of poems which struggle in one way or another with words that refuse to express what we want to express, as in "woe is me" in "3 to's and an Oi". Four sections of poems which carry the McHugh trademark of diamond-sharp craftsmanship, where the French adjective for wit, "spirituel" transfers its approving dimension. Language and passion conspire (I think here of Phedre, "tout conspire a me nuire") and certainly the mind travels at the speed of light beyond dimensions.

[Carolyn Hembree]

The title poem -- a longish sequence -- is astonishing: one of the most beautiful elegies I've read. Also, it teaches very well. While it breaks your heart. McHugh lets a phrasing, a single word, a syllable determine, it seems, the poem's development as much as narrative, meditation, rhetoric. Her brand of lyricism makes the elegy for her friend (losing her faculties) that much more searing and incisive: the poem stumbles, reaches for language as does the dying one.

[William Owen]

The material in this book is wonderful, but everything is secondary to Not a Prayer, a long, grand, tender poem which begins:

"We sleep inside a bullet-
cheek to cheek, in public
anonymity- and then we wake."

If this book contained only the poem "Not a Prayer" it would still be worth buying above almost every other book.

[K.C.]

fanfuckingtastic

[Diane]

For every pleasure, a dozen too-clever frustrations.

[DilanAc]

Honest not sentimental. Incredible variety in line length in a single poem. The first poem, Not a Prayer, describing intimate details of a loved one's death, is incredible.