SOURCE: Murphy, Bruce. Review of Hinge and Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, by Heather McHugh. Poetry 165, no. 3 (June 1995): 170-73.

In the following excerpt, Murphy explores McHugh's use of language in the poems of Hinge and Sign.

Heather McHugh's selection of a quarter century of her poems [Hinge and Sign] is a very fine book, so skip the poet's pretentious preface, which oversells the postmodern, deconstructive side of her work. The first of the “New Poems,” “What He Thought,” is certainly anthology-bound, though its simplicity is somewhat atypical. Over a dinner conversation in Rome, the question “What's poetry?” comes up. Speaking of the statue of Giordano Bruno in the square, an Italian poet says:

                                        And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask, in which 

he could not speak. That's how they burned him. That is how he died: without a word, in front of everyone.                                         And poetry—                                                                                                     (we'd...