SOURCE: Muratori, Fred. Review of To the Quick, by Heather McHugh. Library Journal (15 May 1987): 87-8.

In the following review, Muratori compares To the Quick to David Ray's Sam's Book.

Despite differences in manner and approach, these two poets [McHugh and David Ray] share a need to reconcile their notions of fixity—the taking for granted of things one loves—with the truth of mutability. Ray's latest volume [Sam's Book] is a monument in words to a son who was suddenly killed at 19, leaving his father to conclude that “image is all we have”: snapshots, memories, poems. It's a dignified, plain-spoken book of mourning and remembrance that skirts sentimentality while forthrightly mapping grief's bare terrain.

[In To the Quick] McHugh employs irony, understatement, and wordplay (“We don't / know much, and are / professors of it”) to question our self-centeredness in a world whose proportions are far greater than we recognize...