SOURCE: Gunderson, Elizabeth. Review of Hinge and Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, by Heather McHugh. Booklist 90, no. 18 (15 May 1994): 1660.

In the following review, Gunderson contends that Hinge and Sign allows readers to appreciate the development of McHugh's verse over twenty-five years and “to witness the increasing strength and maturity of her voice.”

In her first collection since Shades (1988), McHugh brings poems from four previous volumes together with a significant amount of new work [in Hinge and Sign: Poems, 1968-1993]. In a brief introduction, she writes that to be a writer with a reader “is rather like being, oneself, of two minds, at every turn: hinge and sign.” Not only are there hinges of lyrical words keeping together the signs in her poems; they also contain a woman with one glass eye, a waddling seal, Fido the Überpooch, and a martyr in an iron mask. McHugh artfully entwines the prosaic with the...