SOURCE: Review of Hinge and Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, by Heather McHugh. Publishers Weekly (25 April 1994): 66.

In the following favorable review, the anonymous critic calls the poetry in Hinge and Sign “a testing ground of edges, allegiances and resistances.”

McHugh (Broken English) is a cerebral writer whose thinking maintains a dialectical tension with her choice of words and forms—they challenge one another. How generic a description that sounds; and yet, McHugh is anything but generic. The words and forms? They tend to be jauntily fastidious, calling to mind something of the steeliness (and the corners cut, in fun and in earnestness) of Emily Dickinson, while also summoning up a sure sense of jazz. The poetry [in Hinge and Sign: Poems, 1968-1993] seems to be a zealously crafted improvisation. And while her very gift for crafting can occasionally crimp or overtake play of mind, most of McHugh's poems are large...