The triggering towns of Richard Hugo

The Seattle Times reviews Frances McCue's digressions on some poems by Richard Hugo, The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs: Revisiting the Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo, in which she travels to the small towns that figure prominently in Hugo's poetry:

McCue, a talented writer and an educated 21st-century woman, does some talking back to Hugo, calling him, for example, on his sexism: "... no woman can be entirely happy with Hugo's choices about the female images in his poems. Either on pedestals, chopped up in riverside shacks, or else the 'ghost in any field/of good crops,' women appear as victims " But with a few exceptions, she doesn't include the people of towns like Wallace or Philipsburg, Montana in the conversation. On visiting a graveyard above Wallace, she writes: "Better than bars, better than grocery stores, graveyards are the places where you feel the thrum of heritage, of stories caught forever in a particular slant. Besides, I love the quiet and the lack of interference, an alternative to hours spent with a librarian or a barkeep, trying to learn about a place." In McCue's text and in Mary Randlett's somber photographs, the small-town streets are mostly empty . . .