SOURCE: Becker, Robin. “The Poetics of Engagement.” The American Poetry Review 30, no. 6 (November-December 2001): 11.

In the following excerpt, Becker maintains that with her poem “Not a Prayer” McHugh “sets out to establish a theater of voices in crisis, and she succeeds.”

Heather McHugh, a poet we associate with punning word-play and high-jinks, engages in a sobering tone in “Not a Prayer” from The Father of the Predicaments, a long poem in which the speaker describes the experience of caring for a beloved friend through her death. In many brief sections of verse and prose, McHugh honors one woman's end-of-life efforts toward speech and offers an intimate, stark portrait of a friendship. Throughout the poem, “Madame Raconteuse” moves in and out of coma, lucid in one passage and unable to speak in the next. Anecdotal, nonlinear, “Not a Prayer” proceeds with an unpredictable logic that enacts language's consolations as well...