[Richard Hugo] is our Western Wordsworth, the coarser pleasures of his earlier years all gone by…. [What Thou Lovest Well, Remains American] is continuous with his last (The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir) and together they have most certainly squeezed all there is to be gotten out of that past; touch any of these poems at any point and you get essential Hugo…. The trouble is that you can't tell one poem from another, the talker does go on and on at the same pitch, confident that his speech will turn into poems. Really the way to read Hugo is to abandon yourself and wait for the line that has a kick to it…. Hugo is trying to come to terms with his own demons; I wish him well, and don't too much begrudge the fact that this activity doesn't invariably result in poems which move beyond privacy or achieve an aesthetic shape that's there for all to admire. He is a "you-man" poet—"The souls / of unique animals and girls above the moisture / wave hello when you come into view"—and I'm sometimes though not always his man. (pp. 295-96)