The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs

by Frances McCue, Mary Randlett (Photographer)

Richard Hugo visited places and wrote about them. He wrote about White Center and La Push in Washington; Wallace and Cataldo in Idaho; Milltown, Philipsburg, and Butte in Montana. Often his visits lasted little more than an afternoon, and his knowledge of the towns was confined to what he heard in bars and diners. From these snippets, he crafted poems. His attention to the actual places could be scant, but Hugo’s poems resonate more deeply than travelogues or feature stories; they capture the torque between temperament and terrain that is so vital in any consideration of place. The poems bring alive some hidden aspect to each town and play off the traditional myths that an easterner might have of the that it is a place of restoration and healing, a spa where people from the East come to recover from ailments; that it is a place to reinvent oneself, a region of wide open, unpolluted country still to settle. Hugo steers us, as readers, to eye level. How we settle into and take on qualities of the tracts of earth that we occupy -- this is Hugo’s inquiry.

Part travelogue, part memoir, part literary scholarship, The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs traces the journey of Frances McCue and photographer Mary Randlett to the towns that inspired many of Richard Hugo’s poems. Returning forty years after Hugo visited these places, and bringing with her a deep knowledge of Hugo and her own poetic sensibility, McCue maps Hugo’s poems back onto the places that triggered them. Together with twenty-three poems by Hugo, McCue’s essays and Randlett’s photographs offer a fresh view of Hugo’s Northwest.

Watch the book

Genres: Poetry, Photography

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Frances McCue is a writer and poet living in Seattle, where she is writer-in-residence at the University of Washington's Undergraduate Honors Program. She was the founding director of Richard Hugo House from 1996 to 2006. McCue is the author of The Stenographer's Breakfast, winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize."

Reviews

[Aerin · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Original review date: 20 November 2010)

I don't read a lot of poetry. My mind is too analytical for its own good, and has trouble following the leaps and intimations of a good poem. But very occasionally, the right poem will hit me at the exact moment I need it in my life, and it is an almost holy experience. Completely unduplicable, except by chance.

I had one of those moments with the very first poem in this book, Richard Hugo's "Duwamish".

See, like Hugo did, I live less than a mile from the Duwamish. I read the poem on a grey Sunday afternoon in late November. The timing was preternaturally perfect. I read it over and over again, unable to move on. I was hooked.

I hadn't been familiar with Hugo before I read this book, and now I don't know how I missed him. He was a prominent poet originally from Seattle who wrote the kind of bleak and melancholy landscape-based poetry that deeply resonates with me. Traveling around Washington, Idaho, and Montana, he would stop in small towns, sometimes for less than a day, then write poems about them. Haunted, lonesome, painful, beautiful poems. From the first lines of "Duwamish", I felt a kinship with him. I too like to drive around by myself, getting lost in the scenery of the Pacific Northwest, feeling both at home and desperately lost, both embraced and all alone. I think about the people who live in these remote places, and I want to be one of them, I used to be one of them. If I had any gift for writing poetry, these are the kinds of poems I'd write.

This book is so much more than just a collection of poems, however. It's an account of how Frances McCue, an English professor at the University of Washington, and Mary Randlett, a renowned photographer, traveled throughout the Northwest in 2007 and 2008. Using Hugo's poems as guides, they went back to the same towns Hugo had visited and written about in the 60's and 70's. They found the landmarks he described, they went into the bars he frequented, they talked to his friends and acquaintances. They discovered what had changed since then, and what had remained the same. To McCue, a devoted Hugo acolyte, this was almost a religious pilgrimage, each tiny Montana town a rosary bead to pray and linger over.

The resulting book is divided into twelve chapters about twelve towns. Each chapter begins with a Hugo poem or two, and one of Randlett's photos, followed by an essay by McCue, illustrated with additional photos. All three components are equally fascinating. The poems consistently took my breath away, and the photographs act as both art and documentary, offering a clear window into these towns as they exist today - often poor, bleak, and disintegrating. But McCue's essays are truly remarkable. From the story of Hugo's life to the story of her own, from travelogue to poetic meditation, from town histories to local causes, from literary analysis of the poems themselves to private musings about what Hugo may have been feeling when he wrote them, her essays are varied and completely engrossing. They filled in the gaps in the poems that my analytical mind couldn't quite bridge, and they told me stories that I couldn't get enough of. By the end of the book, I couldn't help but love Hugo as much as McCue does. Her reverence for him is catching, and her writing is incredible.

If you like poetry, if you like the Pacific Northwest, if you like backroads road trips, if you're fascinated by places and the way they change with time, I can't recommend this book enough. I lingered over it, I didn't want it to end. I read it aloud to myself slowly, in whispers, and went back to certain paragraphs and stanzas again and again, captivated by the way they sounded, the way they said so much in so few words. I peered at the photographs for minutes at a time - the metal-poisoned rivers, the crumbling mills, the clouds rolling past heedless in the enormous sky. Beautiful, beautiful.

[Jer Higgins · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book attracted me by the title and the idea. Frances McCue is a fine writer, but Mary Randlett's photographs had the most impact on me. This book reads more academic than what I was hoping for, but it's an interesting and elegant superimposed view of McCue's recent journey into the actual and poetic towns of Richard Hugo's world.

[Degan Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've learned a lot about Hugo from the Timber Curtain and now Frances McCue's physical road trip through some of Hugo's poems of place and letters from towns around the PNW, Montana and Idaho. I am not *that* interested in him or McCue or the towns so I skimmed the narrative parts but I really like the idea. And love the title.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great tour of the life and truths of the infamous NW poet Richard Hugo.

[Mark Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

McCue's introduction is an excellent read on the various ways writing about a specific place can become much more than descriptive and a thoughtful take on Hugo's own process. Also, I learned that Hugo loved to fish, which isn't a surprise based on the amount of fish and his fondness for describing them in his poetry.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

The geography was familiar, to start with, but what really
held me was the way the author and photographer explored the
towns that had inspired Hugo's poems. They did exactly what
I love to do in any small town, in person or in imagination.

[Stacie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frances did a wonderful job documenting her fascination with Hugo and connecting his poems to the land, connecting herself to his land, retracing his steps, and offering up a kind of closure, for me, to the grief for having missed him when he was alive.

[Dale · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you're a fan of Richard Hugo, or if you are very interested in the minutiae of the history of White Center, Washington, you might like this book. If not, then probably not.