SOURCE: Review of The Father of the Predicaments, by Heather McHugh. Publishers Weekly (26 July 1999): 85.

In the following review, the anonymous critic praises the best poems in The Father of the Predicaments as “comic and profound.”

Bright rhythms, pointed rhymes and dazzling surfaces distinguish McHugh's poems, which tease their language to the ends of wit: “I tell you outright, / I'm a neitherer. But what are you? You are a bother.” McHugh's sixth collection [The Father of the Predicaments] follows her new and selected Hinge & Sign (a National Book Award finalist), and continues her pithily specific explorations of general human conditions: being, thought, life, death, time. The opening “Not a Prayer” demands of the poet “every surge of language, every scrap and flotsam” she has at her command, as she searches for meaning in the death of a septuagenarian, mother-like figure—“a nomen always aiming / for amen.” In the title...