The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography

by Ripley Hugo and Richard Hugo

Book Overview

Hugo was also an editor of the Yale Younger Poets series and a distinguished teacher and master of the personal essay. Now many of his essays have been assembled and arranged by Ripley Hugo, the poet's widow and a writer and teacher, and Lois and James Welch, writers and close friends of the poet. Together the essays constitute a compelling autobiographical narrative that takes Hugo from his lonely childhood through the war years and his working and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039330860X
• ISBN13: 9780393308600
• Release Date: June 1992
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

His Star Gets Brighter With Time

Whether a long-time admirer, or new to Richard Hugo's poetry, this autobiography will give you a much broader context in which to read or re-read Hugo's significant body of work. It contains a non-chronological series of biographical stories about his background. The stories are interspersed with selected poems that are grounded in, or spring from, the gist of the stories. This strikes me as the most complete and intellectually honest way in which to present poetry. I re-read this book after visiting the ACTUAL West Marginal Way, an industrial road that follows the Duwamish waterway south of Seattle (and northeast of Hugo's home town White Center). My pilgrimage to West Marginal Way occurred on a boundless blue-sky day last August...not quite the contents of Hugo's briefcase, but, in the essence of this fine poet, it turned out I was the lone visitor at a roadside stop along West Marginal Way where a empty train right-of-way dissects a picnic-less municipal park (probably built as an afterthought by folks from a better part of town). This book will not disappoint you.

An intense poet looks into the mirror and doesn't flinch

Cliched reviewers say, "you can't put this book down." In the case of poet Richard Hugo's autobiography, I found I needed to put it down occasionally. The book is so intense, so brutally truthful, that the reader has to take a break and walk away from it periodically, just a prize-fighter needs that break between rounds. Growing up on West Marginal Way with his grandparents in Seattle, going through his tour as a bombardier, his early life and eventual emergence as one of the top nation's best poets - and certainly one of the top poetry teachers - Hugo spares neither himself nor the reader. Although modern-day Americans are accustomed to seeing blood and gore on the TV screen, few are prepared for the concussive effects of Hugo's unflinching reminiscences. When the book finally is put down at the end, it stays with the reader, as does an admiration for the extreme courage Hugo took in putting all this down on paper.