Formally innovative and metrically sound without being stuffy, wildly experimental in diction and voice while still being firmly rooted in the vernacular, Heather McHugh's poems are so luminescent they could shine in the dark, and Father of the Predicaments is no exception. An antidote to those who say poetry can't be challenging AND accessible at the same time. I'd also highly recommend picking up Hinge and Sign, her recent New and Selected.

This is a superb collection of poems by one of the world's truly great poets. This is one of the better translations I've read with the authors doing an admirable job of turning Celan's German into a very readable English that still manages to capture Celan's haunting style.

I find her poems more consistently satisfying than Pablo Neruda or Jack Kerouac. Jack's still the man, though.

Heather McHugh is a truly inspirational poet. I have just returned from hearing her read at the Getty Center in LA. What a marvelous experience. McHugh is a truly gifted manipulator of language, from its etemylogical roots, through its syntax, to its artful implimentation in finely wrought metaphors. She brazenly addresses plainly human issues -- sex, love, lust, pain, anger, joy, despair -- in terms that make them readily identifiable as the emotions you have felt but from a perspective slightly ajar to what you might have ever imagined. From hearing her speak, I can tell you she has an enviable mastery of the American language. My copy of "Hinge & Sign" is well worn from weeks of being my constant companion. I eagerly look forward to her new book.

Heather McHugh is one of the best living American poets, and this book shows you some of her finest pieces from the last 25 years. It also has a collection of new poems that both continue and deepen her earlier work.

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.

A work that may speak to some more than to others; still it has a range endemic of effeminate.