Richard Hugo visited places and wrote about them. He wrote about towns:
White Center and La Push in Washington; Wallace and Cataldo in Idaho;
Milltown, Philipsburg, and Butte in Montana. Often his visits lasted
little more than an afternoon, and his knowledge of the towns was
confined to what he heard in bars and diners. From these snippets, he
crafted poems. His attention to the actual places could be scant, but
Hugo's poems resonate more deeply than travelogues or feature stories;
they capture the torque between temperament and terrain that is so vital
in any consideration of place. The poems bring alive some hidden aspect
to each town and play off the traditional myths that an easterner might
have of the West: that it is a place of restoration and healing, a spa
where people from the East come to recover from ailments; that it is a
place to reinvent oneself, a region of wide open, unpolluted country
still to settle. Hugo steers us, as readers, to eye level. How we settle
into and take on qualities of the tracts of earth that we occupy -- this
is Hugo's inquiry.
Part travelogue, part memoir, part literary scholarship, The Car That
Brought You Here Still Runs traces the journey of Frances McCue and
photographer Mary Randlett to the towns that inspired many of Richard
Hugo's poems. Returning forty years after Hugo visited these places, and
bringing with her a deep knowledge of Hugo and her own poetic
sensibility, McCue maps Hugo's poems back onto the places that triggered
them. Together with twenty-three poems by Hugo, McCue's essays and
Randlett's photographs offer a fresh view of Hugo's Northwest.
Watch the book trailer: https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8_W1FZn06w
