Title:Four Salvers Salvaging: New Work by Voigt, Olds, Dove, and McHugh Author(s):Peter Harris Publication Details: The

Virginia Quarterly Review 64.2 (Spring 1988): p262-276. Source:Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Vol. 54. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type:Critical essay, Excerpt Bookmark:Bookmark this Document Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1989 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Lear ning Full Text: [(review date spring 1988) In the following excerpt, Harris finds similarities b etween the poetry of McHugh and Emily Dickinson and briefly describes the develo pment of McHugh's verse.] The epigraph to Heather McHugh's To the Quick is a brief blues lyric from Emily Dickinson about the desire to flee from "the mind of man." Although many America n women poets, most notably Adrienne Rich, celebrate Emily Dickinson as an impor tant precursor, few have actually matched wits with Dickinson or have tried to p ut as much pressure on language to perform feats of association. Heather McHugh provides an exception. She shares with Dickinson a penchant for the use of wit a s an anodyne for anguish; a heterodox bent for metaphysics; and, most importantl y, a compulsively playful language gift that constantly refreshes the terms of o ur understanding through surprising turns of language. Throughout her career, McHugh has possessed, or has been possessed by, a knack f or making aphoristic definitions reminiscent of Dickinson's. She often combines that knack with a distinctive ability to liberate unexpected meanings from ordin ary idioms and turns of phrase. We can see this combination at work in this stan za from "Spot in Space and Time": The indignant have a word they cannot say alone: here here. The soothers say: there there. The dog's confused. He's neither fowl nor fish. He cannot go to Esalen and find himself; he scowls into the new communications dish. Taken out of its context, with only its relentless, wry wit and strong iambic be at to help categorize it, this passage might seem an example of light, satiric v erse. But it's more than that. The passage in question is lodged in a complex, m ultitheme poem which, by the end, becomes tinged with anguish about man's relent less, accelerating self-obsessiveness: "The thinker / stands still, thinking of himself, while there / (in his abandoned microscope) / a million mountains move. " It might be urged that McHugh's poems, by virtue of their impulse towards reflec tiveness, tend to call attention away from the object in the microscope and towa rd the private play of mind. This was truer of her earlier work than it is of To the Quick. The speaker in these new poems carries on a lover's quarrel with her own braininess and shows herself to be acutely aware of how an isolated intelle ct can build itself a hall of mirrors: "your head / in the clouds, your likeness in mind-- / you could fall in love with reason. This / is the mistake. You thin k too much / of your life, far from oceans, far / from rivers, far from streamin g." Throughout the volume, the speaker's sympathy lies with direct experience as opposed to intellection. But direct experience, especially in love, has proven perilously corrosive and has excited in her a compensatory desire to escape vuln erability by creating a verbal world elsewhere. McHugh's poetry is charged with bittersweet pathos because, even as it drives toward what Frost calls "a momenta ry stay against confusion," it battles the impulse to turn that momentary stay i

nto a permanent retreat, where pain is distanced at the tragic cost of not being "touched or moved again." The advance marked in To the Quick over A World of Difference, the volume which precedes it, is McHugh's increased ability to dramatize the private motives that fuel the drive for verbal transcendence. Those motives are pain, loss, anger, w onder, amusement, and despair. A typical poem in To the Quick begins, like many another McHugh poem before it, with a sharp phenomenological observation about t he latent metaphoricalness of everyday language. For example, "The Trouble with 'In'" starts by turning an ear to one of English's most common turns of phrase: In English, we're in trouble. Love's a place we fall into so sooner or later they ask How deep? It's difficult not to feel simple pleasure at seeing a clich rescued, and the plea sure continues as the poem accrues a host of ancillary insights about other hidd en metaphors in the idiom of love relationships. But what gives the poem torque enough to send it into memorable orbit is the closing revelation of the speaker' s stake in her meditation: "I loved you / to no end, and when you said / So far, I knew the idiom: / it meant So long." McHugh hasn't abandoned her phenomenolog ical wit at the end of this poem; rather she has adapted it to convey a highly c harged personal report on the irremediable loss of a lover. The poems in this volume seldom stray far from the quick of her two abiding preo ccupations, language itself and the loss of love. Loss hangs very heavily in the air and would weigh the volume down were it not for the jazzy buoyancy of her g ift for wringing multiple meanings from almost every phrase. The poems are never merely symptoms of the grief or grievance they dramatize. "A Point of Origin" i s a fine example of how her "doubletalk," as she has called it, recoups a vitall y ironic energy from loss. The dramatic situation is tragi-comic. The speaker ha s argued with a lover up to the instant she boards a plane. Upon boarding, she f inds she's lost her seat to an old man who speaks no English and so, unexpectedl y, she gets to travel first class, which cheers her, but hardly enough to let he r to forget what she has left "behind": I taste a couple of lunches, have my little weep in private, take a glass of wine to make abstractions of, in geometric light. But all the while behind me there where calm cannot be bought, where I was meant to stay, somebody's baby cries and cries and cries, impossible to pacify. ... Here McHugh unobtrusively fuses two situations: an infant's pain and the speaker 's pain at a broken relationship. There's no mistaking McHugh's lyrical cry for a child's wail, but she would also have us see how, at the quick, their sufferin g is shared. And this is the great virtue of McHugh's startling "doubletalk": wh en it's in full balance, as it is a great deal of the time, it welds the interio r and exterior worlds, and the past and the present, into a reciprocal, inevitab le-seeming unity.