Poetry | Trade Paper | 0-913028-01-0 | 90 pp. Io Books Cape Elizabeth, Maine 1971 Hough’s first collection shows technically tightly wound poems playing with language and white space on the page. The building of an inner life as the deep pool from which poems come is reflected in comment on external reality: mining in Colorado, living rurally in Maine on Mt. Desert Island and Cape Elizabeth in the last year of the 60’s, the life and work of Celia Thaxter of Isle of Shoals, NH. Hough writes about the first years of life of her first child, Robin amid the daily horror of the endlessly draining war in Vietnam. In the first years of the war when she was living in Ann Arbor she was criticized by more “political” poets for not writing more about the war; by Changing Woman it seeps in, challenging the ability of the poet to live a quietly domestic life when 48 bombing sorties per day are raining down napalm and destruction on North Vietnamese villagers. And no one else in the neighborhood of Cape Elizabeth particularly upset about this. What are the psychic “thoughtographic” abilities of Ted Serios, who Hough and Grossinger learned of in interviewing Jule Eisenbud, the psychiatrist who “discovered” Serios in Denver for Io, 1970. Poems in this collection were published previously in Io, Tansy, and Truck magazines.
more & more they found,
how unusual it was
for anyone
to practice seriously
an art, a ritual, a magic
in the society….
