Shades Shades Shades Shades Shades (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780819511379)

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 her work but moves more deeply into the metaphysical. She writes in paradox, with serious wit and intensity, the crafted language of "stitches in hand and birds in time"; "We part/ before we part; indeed, / we part before we meet." She studies "going matched with coming." She begins with a series of elegies that bring sexuality and death into brutal juxtaposition. Living and dying are the occasions of these poems, the soul the ultimate concern. This poetry takes to heart the fundamental strangeness of being. "Heather McHugh's articulate toughness is a very useful complement to the bedrock wisdom she also offers.A rare delight." - Robert Creely

Author: Heather McHugh
ISBN-10: 0819511374
ISBN-13: 9780819511379
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Language: English
Published: 02/01/1988
Pages: 83
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.52w x 0.26d