Heather McHugh awarded MacArthur Fellowship

Prestigious award recognizes past achievement, future promise

Buy this book now

The MacArthur Foundation has named Seattle-based poet and translator Heather McHugh as one of its 2009 Fellows. The Foundation writes that "McHugh has already influenced a generation of poets and will continue to enrich the art form for years to come."

Copper Canyon Press has just published Upgraded to Serious, McHugh’s eighth book of poetry. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly finds McHugh "as odd and entertaining as ever."

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Anna Swir

Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

My Father's Workshop

I owe my second birth
to my father's workshop.
Father painted its walls
black, it was sublime
like a coffin, on the black walls
tall stained-glass panels
grew in corners, that was
power, they thronged,
every day taller, beating their wings
against the high ceiling, father
was painting in an overcoat, I was cold
and hungry, I used to sit
cross-legged on the floor,
we had no table, and I wrote
Latin verbs, in the alcove
the soup was boiling, mother,
sick, was lying there, I was
afraid she would die,
I would wake up at night
afraid they both would die,
I listened to their breathing, the window in the roof
was white with frost, the coal
used up, I thought
under my blanket that I
would be the Spirit-King, in the ceiling
there was a hook
from which a starving painter
who lived here
hanged himself.

Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan