Large Man in the Mountains: The Recent Work of Richard Hugo

F R E D E R I C K G A R B E R State University of New York Binghamton, New York Large Man in the Mountains: The Recent Work of Richard Hugo Most things that change affect everything else around them, even in a poetic world like Richard Hugo’s where loneliness is endemic and contact always sporadic. Hugo’s recent work shifts the habitual locale of his movements as well as some patterns within them; but the interplay between change and the elements that persist is now, paradoxically, a constant in his work. We know what he will carry with him, though not exactly what he will see or how he will react. Like Hugo himself we are fascinated with the fixed as well as the mutable. In The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, his fourth book, half of the poems are about Montana, its towns, landscape and people, and the other half about points elsewhere, reached by touring. Montana is a new point of local reference, which for Hugo means a new framework that defines the parameters of a mode of seeing. The Montana sections begin and end The Lady, enclosing the tours and establishing the context in which the acts of his imagination have to be viewed. A poem like “Point No Point,” then, which is a piece of Hugo’s old Northwest landscape, comes through with facts seen that are foreign to this new frame. And that dislocation is part of the point: wherever he is, Hugo’s world is studded with the imagery of landscapes that have been the locale of past feelings, and he can never shake those moods and places off. If he moves on, Montana will take its own place in the museum of his feelings. Now he has brought in Point No Point, and what he sees there is not a piece of the landlocked Rockies but part of a world where the sea and the rivers it sucks into itself make up the deep ground of things: “Seabirds are remote / enough to go unnamed, unnamed enough / to laugh a favorite 206 Western American Literature harm away. Waves / go on buffooning and cheap stitching gives / and one bird is Old Betsy flapping north.” This is the dominant voice of Hugo’s first two books, a voice that learned about elemental matters from the facts of the Pacific Northwest. At its best the sounds are taut and sure, playing with tense pitches of verbal and syntactical pressure as he moves with nervous fluency from one fact in the landscape to another — facts seen as they affect and reflect the personality of the fat man who faced the Pacific Northwest. He knew all points in that landscape and what it meant when he stood there and faced the alien sea or its offshoots in the imperturbable rivers of the Olympic peninsula and the limited access to the streets of Seattle. A poet’s voice is a record of reactions, the sound of a way of seeing. Its elements are in part determined by the specifics of the landscapes to which he is answering. For a poet like Hugo, who carries all of his old worlds with him, the elements of voice are also determined by all that he has faced that is still there for him: Seattle and some ancient pains are continually modifying — and being modified by — whatever new terri­ tory he reaches. Through all the changes in external specifics, however, there is a radical private mode which Hugo learned early and keeps with him in every landscape. William Stafford, his counterpart on the plains, does the same, moving everywhere with certain essential frames of reference. Frost did too, and so did Hardy for the most part. Yeats was not so dependable: the shift from the early mellifluousness to Crazy Jane can be bridged by explanations but, read coldly outside of the classroom, the collected poems can still startle. What Richard Hugo learned about elemental matters from the Pacific Northwest was firm enough to make a permanent mode of vision. Still, his talent is so supple and his awareness so complex that he can adapt his central mode to all...