Eyeshot

Heather McHugh

The best thing about Eyeshot is Heather McHugh's amazing use of language; it's like reading John M. Bennett without the dyslexia and cut-up/fold-in stuff. McHugh has one of the strongest senses of rhythm, both in formal and free verse, I've come across in quite a while, and it usually manifests itself without drawing attention to the form (in those poems where one exists in this collection; the forms here are usually on the loose side anyway), an amazing achievement in a time when formal poetry may not be dead, but is lying in hospice, suffocated by the weight of a million teen-angst poets who think sonnets are for sissies and have never heard the word "canzone." Read this.