Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Upon publication of The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir in 1973, Richard Howard wrote, -Richard Hugo's concern is the unenviable, the unenviable, the unvisited, even the univiting, which he must invest with his own deprivation, his own private war. . . . Each poem adds its incisive particulars to the general stoic wreck; but what startles, then reassures in all this canon of the inconsolable, the unsanctified, the dispossessed, is Hugo's poetics, the analogy of language to experience. . . . Richard Hugo is such an important poet because the difficulties inherent in his art provide him a means of saying what he has to say. It is no accident that he must develop a negative in order to produce a true image.-