Title:Review of The Father of the Predicaments Author(s):Bruce F. Murphy Publication Details: Poetry 177.3 (Jan. 2001): p279-280.

Source:Poetry Criticism. Vol. 61. Detroit: Gale, 2005. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type:Critical essay, Excerpt Bookmark:Bookmark this Document Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning Full Text: [(essay date January 2001) In the following excerpt, Murphy notes McHugh's cleve r and often powerful use of language in The Father of the Predicaments.] More than half a century ago Edmund Wilson argued in the essay "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" that "the technique of prose is inevitably tending more and more to take over the material which had formerly provided the subjects for composition s in verse." Still timely is Wilson's comment that "the two techniques of writin g are beginning to appear, side by side or combined, in a single work," and that "recently the techniques of prose and verse have been getting mixed up at a bew ildering rate--with the prose technique steadily gaining." Heather McHugh is one of those contemporary poets who have written poems that mi x prose with poetry--as opposed to writing "prose poems," which are supposed to be prose entirely, while being poetry at the same time. Suffice it to say that M cHugh's new book [The Father of the Predicaments] begins with the longish poem, "Not a Prayer," a beautiful work about the death of a woman who seems to be in t he final stages of Alzheimer's Disease. The poem is moving partly because of the scenes it contains, such as the moment when "she is lifting one hand / up towar d her mouth to take / a great big bite from--ah!--an apple: / very gesture of go od health," but there is no apple there, her hand is empty and she "bites down h ard" and cannot understand why she fails. On another level, McHugh is interested in the short circuiting of the language centers of the sufferer, the jumbled ph rases that, "if anybody / listens long enough," reveal "something terribly intel ligible." Yet there's nothing clinical, or removed, or clever about these lingui stic observations; it's just the way it is, for this group of people watching th is beloved person go out of existence. It also prepares you for the most wrenchi ng moment of the poem, which is not the moment of death, but a farewell to a dea r friend in which the shattered mind musters itself for a final leap into intell igibility: the voice of Martha in the cellphone saying tinnily: "We love you, dearest friend; we love your love of life," and leaning back I saw upon that listening face some wild emotions, efforts, tearings of intent, attempts to speak--and then there burst out from her voicebox words--or rather, one word cried three times--so loud the others all came running from their rooms: Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye Phrases like "tearings of intent" and the linebreak that creates a hesitation ju st before "words" in the second stanza show McHugh's hallmark: precision. If, as Wilson said, the "work of the imagination" is "the recreation, in the harmony a nd logic of words, of the cruel confusion of life," then this is work of a high order. It is interesting to see why, when she uses prose passages, McHugh's language re mains under pressure, powerful. The sentence "We talked our time away around her figure in the silent chair, we missed our Madame Raconteuse," is obviously iamb

ic, and could be rewritten as decasyllabic lines. This is even true of later poe ms in the book, where McHugh falls back into her usual conceptual mode, for exam ple "Nano-Knowledge," whose opening, "There, a little right / of Ursus Major, is / the Milky Way," is chopped up on the page but strikes the ear as--dare one sa y it?--quite regular verse.