SOURCE: Murphy, Bruce F. Review of The Father of the Predicaments, by Heather McHugh. Poetry 177, no. 3 (January 2001): 279-80.

In the following excerpt, Murphy notes McHugh's clever and often powerful use of language in The Father of the Predicaments.

More than half a century ago Edmund Wilson argued in the essay “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” that “the technique of prose is inevitably tending more and more to take over the material which had formerly provided the subjects for compositions in verse.” Still timely is Wilson's comment that “the two techniques of writing are beginning to appear, side by side or combined, in a single work,” and that “recently the techniques of prose and verse have been getting mixed up at a bewildering rate—with the prose technique steadily gaining.”

Heather McHugh is one of those contemporary poets who have written poems that mix prose with poetry—as opposed...