Earthmoving Malediction By Heather Mchaugh Summary

“Earthmoving Malediction” by Heather McHugh is a poem written about a house being figuratively demolished by the narrator, the narrator then illustrates the frustration she has and her all-or-nothing attitude. The tone of the poem is very bitter. The narrator is blunt in her assessment of the ended relationship. She is saddened because she has somehow lost her love, but angry because of how it ended or the fact that she has all these memories that still hurt her. The first stanza is talking about the demolition of a home. The narrator says “bulldoze the bed where we made love /bulldoze the goddamn room”. These two lines show a mix of a relationship ending and the hatred of the memory of the relation. In the third line of that stanza, the

Turning the dirt would be physically putting dirt on the ashes of the burned comforter. In doing this, the remains would be covered up and hidden from the eyes of the narrator, and in a sense, the comforter will have been destroyed and vanish.
The third stanza perhaps lets the reader know a reason for why she hates her ex-lover, and doesn’t want anything to remain that could bring back memories of the person or seen as evidence that anything ever happened between the two of them. The narrator states “The fist / will vindicate the hand”. To me, this meant that there was at least one physical fight between the couple where he hit her.
The narrator wants to get rid of these memories, so she asks for a bulldozer to wreck and destroy the most tangible item that reminds the narrator of her lost love. The bulldozer symbolizes the relationship that is being, or has been destroyed. The bulldozer is the thing that is taking away all of her physical

Lot”. When she says this, the narrator alludes to a story in the Bible: “But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt” (New International Version, Gen. 19:26). Lot’s wife is Mrs. Lot in the poem. When the narrator makes this reference, she is saying that looking back on the happy times they had can make you unhappy. The narrator has to move on and forget about this house and it’s memories if she wants to be happy. The last stanza is the best visual to the narrator’s all-or-nothing attitude. The narrator argues, “if paradise comes down / there is no hell”. Paradise is referencing the perfect, happy moments that the couple had, and hell is referencing how the narrator is feeling now. If there is no paradise, as in, if she can forget that they had ever had happy times, if she can forget any happy moment with this man who possibly hit her, then she won’t be plagued by memories of it. “Earthmoving Malediction” is a short poem, with short lines, but because the author is as blunt and straight-forward as she is, a lot more is able to be portrayed in the poem. There is a sense of density In her book Imaginative Writing, Janet Burroway describes density as being, “more-than-one-thing-at-a-time [which] raises the intensity of feeling”