Into These Knots, and: Circles Where the Head Should Be (review)

Reading Ashley McHugh's impressive first volume, I'm reminded of Robert Frost's maxim that in a book of twenty-four poems, the book itself should be the twenty-fifth. Into These Knots is a case in point. "Deer Hunting," the opening poem, establishes several image motifs that will recur and give the book a kind of submerged structure:

Beware the favor of God.The muzzle dropped, dead eyes float backin their slits as my father liftsthat sagging neck by its antler rack . . .

He gutted it clean, then hung that deerfrom the apple tree. We ateits warm dark meat all winter that year.

Next fall, his tree-stand snapped—my father fell, and splintered his spine.Half-buried by leaves, he prayedfor mercy—for an answer, a sign.

This poem's apple tree initiates a motif of petals; the father will come back both as God the Father and the father of "Jake" in "Cairns"; and the deer's "dark meat" returns in "Hunting Accident," one of the last poems in the book:

His tree-stand whimpered, twisted from the trunk—down and down— and then daylight staggered,and he knew what it was when his lungs faltered,

wheezed, and then lifted . . .

The man has tracked and shot a deer, whose eyes are

diluted and uncertain, almostalive—a second shot, then the lull,like a cradle. Becoming meat is so simple.

The light rhyme of lull with simple, the slow-motion sensation of falling, the gaps in the father's breath as he wheezes, the pause before his "second shot," the space between "Becoming" and the insentient "meat" a deer or a man becomes—together, these demonstrate the poet's uncommonly subtle attention to the expressiveness of her forms.

McHugh's formal versatility is evident throughout the book. In "One Important and Elegant Proof," a gently satirical blank-verse scene between a patient and a therapist, McHugh's character speaks candidly about her relationship with Christianity—both her estrangement and her "visceral response" to a scene of faith, of grief:

"This red-faced little girl hung on her elbow,rubbing her face against her mother's arm.Then I heard this sigh, a rattle of a sigh,and turned. The teenage boy right next to mewas biting his lip, his fingers digging hardinto the pew . . ."        She waited for a question. No.She tried to think of something else to say . . .She knew she ought to talk. "I guess I thinkmaybe the ritual of it had moved me?Or maybe God was really there? Or elsethe Holy Spirit? Something. Maybe not.It was a visceral response, almost.Simple. Simple is just the only word."

The word "simple" and the relation of viscera to "Becoming meat" add "Elegant Proof" to the book's accumulating perspectives on religious yearning and domestic grief.

This poem of uncertain faith is followed by a prayer (written, ironically, in an ancient Greek stanza form), entitled with Joseph's statement to Lot that, "If you will, you can become all flame."

Desert priests who prayed for Your sparks before me    caught Your heat like kindling—and now, I'm asking,God: Come blazing. Burn as you did for Moses.    Father of fathers, speak to me tonight. Let my hand ignite. Here,    fingers tipped with flame, I will understand Youcome, as small as stars, to our own fists, come as    pinpricks of fire.

A moving, and commendably serious poem. If this first volume of McHugh's career has a weakness, it's the opposite: levity, irony. She achieves a humorously satirical tone in "Elegant Proof," but in a poem like "From His Coy Mistress" the jokes fall a bit flat. Perhaps her next collection will exhibit an expanded range (lighter or more self-deprecating tones, the juxtaposition of solemn and frivolous things), proving...