Into These Knots: Poems

"The poems in Into These Knots are graceful and powerful in equal measure---beautifully written raids on the inarticulate from a clear-eyed poet probing the beginnings of song in the unsayable. The beautiful balance extends throughout poems; the emotional resonances of every thought are weighed carefully and every emotion is fully thought through. Love may be, as Ashley Anna McHugh tells us, `a rust-worn boat,' but with her (and thrilled to be along for the ride), `We thread / A slow wake through the water---then silently, / We start to row, and will for as long as this lasts."'---Andrew Hudgins

The poems of Into These Knots, Ashley Anna McHugh's debut collection, glance from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven, interrogating and clucidating ultimate questions and intimate foibles in elegant and supercharged speech. With equal parts intelligence and passion, Ms. McHugh can quarrel with Scripture or riff on the amorous pleadings of Andrew Marvell and the stark musings of Baudelaire. In "Cairns," a brilliant sequence that plays with the boundaries of the sonnet, mountain hikes in rural West Virginia trace, among other things, the difficult path-ways to the divine.

Ms. McHugh's poems resound with a songlike intensity and an arresting voice entirely their own. Personal meditations on loss and the need to reconcile with the past ground this collection, even as the poems struggle against their precarious conclusions. Skillfully crafted, the poems in Into These Knots capture a precise clarity of cadence, accompanied by an exacting attention to the intricacies of traditional verse. The formal assurance of the poems lends a transformative control, a certain deliberateness, to the disordering events and emotions thus revealed. Frequently returning to their tonic chord of doubt, the poems never abandon their search for a lasting belief, attainable transcendence, and, above all, possibility of forgiveness.

Ashley Anna McHugh's poems have appeared in The New Criterion, Measure, the Hopkins Review, and Smartish Pace, and she has also written Become All Flame, a chapbook of her poems. Ms. McHugh studied at The Ohio State University and at Boston University, and is now pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. She received the 2009 Morton Marr Poetry Prize. She is also a senior editor for Linebreak and lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.