My previous review at Amazon: Heather McHugh writes more delightful and profound poems in Shades. Her main concerns seem to be time and language, drawing from relationships. She often pulls in unexpected parallels, and she also tightens things together by playing with similar sounds.

One example: In "Inflation" (page 25) she compares language to money and moving pictures. ("Language wasn't any / funny money I was playing with, / no toy surprise" and "But now I'm dumb / to frame the stream / of stills I feel" and, touching them together, "a bill of silver senselessness--the seconds counted / in the hundreds, in the thousands, in the billions, till the till")

It gave me great pleasure to read this book and I recommend it. ( )