Eyeshot / Heather McHugh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McHugh, Heather, 1948-

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Wesleyan poetry

Language:

English

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copies 1 & 2)

Physical Description:

54 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press, [2003]

Summary:

Heather McHugh's new book, Eyeshot, is a brooding, visionary work that takes aim at the big questions -- love and death. The poems suggest that such immensities balance on the smallest details, and that a range of human blindness is inescapable. The power of this new work comes from its delicate yet tenacious fidelity to the everunfolding senses of sense. The poems invite the reader to follow careening words and insights through passages both playful and profound. Her "Fido, Jolted by Jove" reveals the tension endemic to both language and living: "the world itself is worried." Yet the same poem remarks the high price of any reductive fix: "a brain this insecure may need another bolt be driven in it." This movement between anxiety and the human compulsion for order informs Eyeshot's darkly comic, 20/20 acuity.

Contents:

World in a Skirt 3

Goner's Boner 4

Fido, Jolted by Jove 5

Significant Suspicions 6

Fourth of July, B.C. 7

Unhygienic Song 8

Letters, Numbers, Signs, Words Referred to as Words 9

Boy Thing 11

The Magic Cube 13

Impolitic 15

The Retort Room 17

Sampling 18

Lectator's Song 19

Far Sight 20

Iquity 21

Four Commissions 25

Songs for Scientists, Parts I and II 25

Song for the Men of the Pennsylvania Hills 27

Song for a Mountain Climber 28

Mankind's Pet, the Copycat 29

Four Poems after the Chinese 31

After Su Tung P'o 31

After Li Bai 31

After Wang Wei 32

After Su Tung P'o 32

Two Tunes for Elliott 33

Affinity Welled 33

One's Mons 34

Back to B.C. 35

Night Storm 37

Mind's Eye 38

A Dearth in the Dreamboat Department 39

Voicebox 40

Pound Sign 41

Long Shot with Shutter 43

Settling Song 44

Through (after Sully Prudhomme) 47

Blind Men (after Charles Baudelaire) 48

Out of Eyeshot 49

The Suicide (after Jorge Luis Borges) 51

The Looker 52.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy 2 has dustjacket retained.

ISBN:

0819566713

OCLC:

52269040