Heather McHugh Critical Essay | Critical Review by Publishers Weekly

Critical Review by Publishers Weekly

SOURCE: Review of Eyeshot, by Heather McHugh. Publishers Weekly 250, no. 35 (1 September 2003): 84.

In the following review, the anonymous critic views the poems of Eyeshot as a return to McHugh's “signature bravura and obsessive word play.”

With an oeuvre that includes criticism (notably the 1993 volume Broken English) and a wide-range of translation (most recently, of Euripedes), McHugh here [in Eyeshot] returns to her own signature bravura and obsessive word play, focussing on the struggle of eye and mind, brain and body, to mediate the exacting details of an exquisitely overwrought world: “The mind is made / to discipline the eye so that the eye / can aim the mind—or else …” In a state of near-constant overstimulation, the hyper-attentive intelligencer at times must struggle simply to stay afloat: “Sight … sponsors far / too much detail (exhaustive is exhausting!).” McHugh scrutinizes the lewd and the illustrious...
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