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.

The only extant satyr play of Euripides, the Cyclops abounds in lusty comedy and horror: Odysseus and his men, driven by storms onto Cyclops' shores, find that the Cyclops has aready enslaved a company of Greeks. When some of Odysseus' crew are seized and eaten by the cyclops Odysseus resorts to spectacular strategems to free his crew and escape the island. This distinguished poet's version of the CYCLOPS refreshes the work with all the salty humour, vigorous music, and dramatic shapeliness available in modern American English. McHugh, a prize-winning poet, and Konstan, a respected classicist, combine their talents to create this new addition to the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series. Each play in the series, meant for the non-specialist reader, is preceded by a critical introduction and is accompanied by notes designed to clarify obscure references and to explain the conventions of the Athenian stage.

Paul Celan s widely recognized as the greatest and most studied post-war European poet. At once demanding and highly rewarding, his poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This selection of poems, now available in paper for the first time, is comprised of previously untranslated work, opening facets of Celan's oeuvre never before available to readers of English. These translations, called "perfect in language, music, and spirit" by Yehuda Amichai, work from the implied premise of what has been called Intention auf die Sprache, delivering the spirit of Celan's work--his dense multilingual resonances, his brutal broken music, syntactic ruptures and dizzying wordplay.

Shades is a book of shadow and light cast between trees and sun, between day and room, between life and death. It acknowledges endings as beginnings; it offers compassion and tenderness, searching for hope in the richness of nature; it seeks the same resources within the human being.
Heather McHugh's companion volume to To the Quick (Wesleyan 1987) continues the music and brilliance characteristic of her work but moves more deeply into the metaphysical. She writes in paradox, with serious wit and intensity, the crafted language of "stitches in hand and birds in time"; "We part/ before we part; indeed, / we part before we meet..." She studies "going matched with coming." She begins with a series of elegies that bring sexuality and death into brutal juxtaposition. Living and dying are the occasions of these poems, the soul the ultimate concern. This poetry takes to heart the fundamental strangeness of being.