Feeler (Quarternote Chapbook Series) - Softcover

McHugh, Heather

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1946448427 ISBN 13: 9781946448422

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2019

Synopsis

Since Heather McHugh first began publishing her poems in 1968, poetry readers have marveled at the immensity and range of her gift. There seems to be nothing that McHugh can’t do with words and do with high wit and sonic brilliance. In her chapbook Feeler, McHugh takes on the fraught subject of empathy―how much we feel, and do, for the afflicted. It also addresses the relation between thought and feeling: “Nowadays I cannot tell/ the two apart: can’t feel things thoughtlessly/or think things up without emotion.”  As with only the very best poets, McHugh seamlessly combines thought and feeling, in poems that are entertaining and profound.

About this title

About the Author:

Heather McHugh frequents the Salish Sea areas of western Washington State and southern British Columbia. ln addition to her 2009 MacArthur Fellowship, she has won many distinguished awards for writing and for teaching, having taught for decades at the University of Washington in Seattle, as well as at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College (and elsewhere). Between 1979 and 2009, collections of her essays, translations, and original poetry regularly appeared in print, but FEELER will be her first new volume since 2009.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Shots in the ICU
The unwritten CDs have stripes

of spectrum down their faces, there in their

transparent cases―perfect traces of

what otherwise were mere

idea or metaphor . . . some gist

or twist or history
of light. The pure

appearance of

refraction in these lines

can shift into the vertical;

it’s utterly resistant to

the daily laterals and dull

collaterals; its otherworldliness

is wildest for precision: close-up rainbow

several millimeters wide, a dwelling place

for uncontainables―in analytic radiance to run

from the outer edge of a disc straight toward

its center, not in coils, concentric (as upon his old LPs),

but deepening in radii from

two to three towards four
dimensions. His bifocals

now removed, his hopes extinguished,

Dad keeps hissing life’s a swindle. Birthing room

to deathbed, that’s the line―a legacy from sunlight, long

profession now inclined
to sharpness, as the read-outs

turn to shout-outs, shivers to Intensive Care’s

own nursing station. ere’s the backed-up

window-ledge I rest my sights upon―
the plumb-line down the centers of

the stacked CDs, unreadable until

a setting star brings out
a better sense for it in me.

The rods and cones inform a living hole

with spiked or spindly evidence. O

pupil! Crazy cornucopia! For I
was blind, and you were blind, but now

we have myopia.
One Big Being
Despite our greeds and all

Our cultural tenacities, which pull us

Back like suckers on a

Phototrope
The destiny of our

Increasing numbers on

Diminishment of ground

Is towards convergence, and

The averaging away of the extremes.

Sometimes it’s hard to read or feel it, but

In time it has to happen. Solid waters melt
To one dynamic sea, and earth flows

Up from pressure, widening to air; we cannot help

Resembling one another more and more: the races, parties,

Genders, even ages tend to lose their hallowed individualities.

A matter of techology, as well: the mind is seeded, seeding other minds

(we call this fashion, when we name the memes). So then the lines
and boundaries relent (whether of nations, or the other premises

for being here among the beasts, for being any kind at all,

a man of brown or beige, a middle age―o middle! Where

are you?―a radical, or sister, or resister? All the bodies

surge towards to merge. Only the flags and
fears pretend to

old anachronistic independences

but all in all we’re growing more and more

related, more familiar in this collectivity, our bloom

of group identity and glue, this gravitas conferred on us

by planetary etymology, I’d say, among the ever tinier and more
discriminable stars.
Lament of the Touched
For Ellen, first and last
Detachment’s being

thought achievable
is boggling in itself. Its being thought

achievable by love, a love

for all (not only every)

sentience (the human kind and

bestial alike) at times appears
the precept of

intelligences terribly

untouched. How much
of a hand in things must we

promote before
relinquishing the things at hand?

What kiss of mind would such

communal sense permit? A swirl of dust

in schools perhaps . . . Slow learners of

my ilk must spurn
the selving sensualities to feel
for feelers of this kind:

unfasten passion’s

burners to discern
whatever’s cooler under it.

In short, must court

dispassion just
to be compassionate.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1946448427
• ISBN 13: 9781946448422
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 40