Most of his life Richard Hugo lived on one margin or another, whether geographical or psychic, a circumstance that is reflected in his poems. He grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Seattle from which he could gaze into the more privileged world of the middle class; in Missoula, Montana, where he taught at the University of Montana for nearly eighteen years, his favorite haunts were not libraries but taverns of working men and women such as the Oxford and the Milltown Union Bar. His poems celebrate abandoned towns and abandoned people. In the title essay from The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography (1986), a collection assembled by his widow, Ripley S. Hugo, and friends Lois and James Welch, Hugo writes, “It is no accident that the speaker in many of my poems is alone and that the people he has relations with are usually dead.” Always...