The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs: Revisiting the Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo (review)

There are those to whom place is unimportant ...

—Theodore Roethke, "The Rose"

In the last days of his life, as he lay in a hospital bed, Richard Hugo said to my mother, "Dorothy, soon I'll need to make a very difficult decision: whether to have my ashes scattered over the waters of Puget Sound—or the Kapowsin Tavern!" And then he laughed his amazing, helpless, generous laugh.

Hugo had to scatter his affections broadly, writing poems from remote towns he loved to people he felt needed to know his secrets. Towns he loved? Well, not quite so simple as that. The epistolary voice in his poems speaks from damaged places that revealed his own hurts, from towns that showed, in disintegration, the bones of his psychic yearning, places that caught his attention, and played his heart like a big fish.

This book is a treasure, a big open car going far and wide to find the sources of poetry. Frances McCue returns to the origin points of twenty-four of Hugo's place poems and looks deeply into the rich debris of his winsome, slatternly muse—places like Phillipsburg, Dixon, Silver Star, La Push. With this journey, McCue, the founding director of the Hugo House in Seattle, expands the devotions of that house to the magnitude of a region. Room by room, we visit the local stuff of Hugo's hungers. With photographer Mary Randlett, McCue does what Hugo did: drive long western miles, pull into town, and have a hard look at what remains. But unlike Hugo, McCue carries with her a lens for this looking, and that lens is the fierce, prismatic glance of Hugo's poems.

The design of our experience as we read here is a rich ambidexterity: McCue reaches outward into the world by visiting the towns and observing them closely while reaching inward through her familiarity with the Hugo Archives and her own acute poetic sensibility. The result is a reading of the poems that is remarkably informed. Hugo once said in an interview, "I'll change an old town ... into a town the poem can use" (92). McCue, on the scene, unravels those changes so we can see the poems for exactly what they do: X-ray reality to brag the bones of Hugo's soul.

Richard Hugo moved quickly through this life. His visits to these towns could be brief. As McCue admits, "His attention to the actual places could be scant, but Hugo's poems ... capture the torque between temperament and terrain that is so vital in any consideration of place" (3). Torque is the perfect expression for what happens in Hugo's poems. He began his writing career translating conversations with engineers at Boeing into technical descriptions of how things work. In his poems, torque becomes the physics of the soul. And in this book, through McCue's roving inhabitation of the towns of his poetry, Hugo's maintenance manual for our life in the Northwest has become a map the size of the territory.