Shades Shades Shades Shades Shades

by Heather McHugh

Book Overview

An exquisite series of poems that explore living and dying. Shades is a book of shadow and light cast between trees and sun, between day and room, between life and death. It acknowledges endings as beginnings; it offers compassion and tenderness, searching for hope in the richness of nature; it seeks the same resources within the human being. This companion volume to To the Quick (Wesleyan 1987) continues the music and brilliance characteristic of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0819511374
• ISBN13: 9780819511379
• Release Date: February 1988
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Length: 83 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Another Pick for Puns and Play

Heather McHugh writes more delightful and profound poems in Shades. Her main concerns seem to be time and language, drawing from relationships. She often pulls in unexpected parallels, and she also tightens things together by playing with similar sounds.One example: In "Inflation" (page 25) she compares language to money and moving pictures. ("Language wasn't any / funny money I was playing with, / no toy surprise" and "But now I'm dumb / to frame the stream / of stills I feel" and, touching them together, "a bill of silver senselessness--the seconds counted / in the hundreds, in the thousands, in the billions, till the till")It gave me great pleasure to read this book and I recommend it.