SOURCE: Scharper, Diane. Review of Eyeshot, by Heather McHugh. Library Journal 128, no. 13 (August 2003): 89.

In the following review, Scharper elucidates the inventiveness of McHugh's language in the poems of Eyeshot.

Invented words, surrealistic imagery, sexual innuendoes, quirky free associations of sound and sense sometimes suggesting profound truths: these are the hallmarks of McHugh's poetry. In her seventh book [Eyeshot], McHugh (a National Book Award finalist for Hinge & Sign) writes mostly about dogs, sex, night, death, and fireworks, creating a frenetic energy by breaking rules of syntax. She finds words within a word: “My one / and only: money / minus one.” She puts similar-sounding words together, “grandma thinks of love—and gets / amen, a mensch, a mention.” She makes nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, and otherwise mines verbal ambiguities—the title poem being a good example. Like the German poet Paul Celan (1920-70), whose work she has translated, McHugh writes...