Brenda Hillman – författare

Drawing on four decades of work and including new poems published here for the first time, this selection of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetry displays the extraordinary luminosity characteristic of her style - its delicate, meticulous observation, great scenic imagination, and unusual degree of comfort with states of indetermination, contingency, and flux.

The poems in "Writing the Silences" represent more than 60 years of Richard O. Moore's work as a poet. Selected from seven full-length manuscripts written between 1946 and 2008, these poems reflect not only Moore's place in literary history - he is the last of his generation of the legendary group of San Francisco Renaissance poets - but also his reemergence into today's literary world after an important career as a filmmaker and producer in public radio and television. "Writing the Silences" reflects Moore's commitment to freedom of form, his interest in language itself, and his dedication to issues of social justice and ecology.

Three Talks is the first prose collection by the award-winning poet and educator Brenda Hillman. These short essays on six M’s of the art of poetry make the form accessible in a novel way, exploring words that might appear incompatible but become dancing partners in Hillman’s artistic vision: metaphor and metonymy; meaning and mystery; magic and morality.First delivered as a series of talks at the University of Virginia, the essays maintain a casual, intimate tone. A consummate artist and technician, Hillman explores a wide array of poetic examples, focusing on method, subject matter, and inspiration to demonstrate how the skills offered by poetry have become critically important for our present moment.

Meditations on time, space, and objects in houses, as well as lives of children, mothers & non-human creatures in domestic spaces_x000D_/>_x000D_/>Each of Brenda Hillman's books has been transformative for her readers, and her twelfth collection is no exception. Building on previous volumes about seasons, days and minutes, Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-twentieth century. Here, magical poems explore rooms as opportunities for dream, and domestic objects as the dream-shapes where culture and imagination inform each other. In that way, the poet celebrates the layered lives of children and adults, including, strikingly, the life of her mother, a native of Brazil whose presence intimately links the processes of inner vision and daily tasks. Like Hillman's other pioneering work, these poems are personal and collective; they braid the spiritual, the scientific, the political and the visionary. Short spare lyrics are placed beside longer pieces; small photos add to the visual structures of the pages. One long prose poem explores the child's neurological anxiety and the awakening of mid-century environmental consciousness, while another is a meditation on women's domestic work with textiles and the rhetoric of literary repetition. The closing sequence gives homage to unlikely intersections of humans with non-human lives, including dust mites, moths and mycorrhizal roots. This remarkable collection will plunge readers into the mysteries of childhood and of childhood houses everywhere._x000D_/>_x000D_/>[Sample Poem]_x000D_/>_x000D_/>The newspaper _x000D_/>_x000D_/>Sunlight crosses the room bearing elastic dust motes._x000D_/>_x000D_/>Clouds graze steadily over the house._x000D_/>_x000D_/>Trucks cross the suburbs; they have been cleared for departure._x000D_/>_x000D_/>The mother scours the morning paper for facts _x000D_/>& uplifting stories, laughing— _x000D_/>almost a little snort—  _x000D_/>maybe it's disbelief, maybe_x000D_/>it's puffs of air pushed out by her idea of God. _x000D_/>_x000D_/>In this line, it's the next century,_x000D_/>_x000D_/>in this line the mother & her little laugh are gone,_x000D_/>_x000D_/>in this line two ravens eat a carcass in Maryland,_x000D_/>_x000D_/>a hurried driver doesn't hit a fawn,_x000D_/>        _x000D_/>the vote is being tallied, the red seeps across the map_x000D_/>_x000D_/>& drips from the thick finger of Florida into a sea _x000D_/>        of pre-named storms, & the sea of blood rises,_x000D_/>_x000D_/>the small barge carrying corpses of fact & dream,_x000D_/>_x000D_/>their bones wrapped together in newsprint.

In the title poem "Fortress", the medieval walled castle is the stronghold in which the family dwells. There are stories here of people in the "fortresses" of the self, the city, or the natural world. All these poems have in common a lyrical approach to solitude ("the only protection / against death/ was to love solitude") and an ironical vision for which love of beauty and the longing for the world are the cure. Hillman combines the imagistic with narrative; in her poems lyricism wars with irony; the solitary noticing consciousness is in control - because the observed world seems beautiful to the observer, great joy is possible despite the sense of difficulty or sorrow. The language here is rich and elegant. Truth is relentlessly addressed.

Brenda Hillman begins her new book in a place of mourning and listening that is deeply transformative. By turns plain and transcendent, these poems meditate on trees, bacteria, wasps, buildings, roots, and stars, ending with twinned elegies and poems of praise that open into spaces that are both magical and archetypal for human imagination: forests and seashores. As always, Hillman's vision is entirely original, her forms inventive and playful. At times the language turns feral as the poet feels her way toward other consciousnesses, into planetary time. This is poetry as a discipline of love and service to the world, whose lines shepherd us through grief and into an ethics of active resistance. Hillman's prior books include Practical Water and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the Griffin Prize for Poetry. Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days is a visionary and critically important work for our time. A free reader's companion is available online at http://brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

The last living member of the original circle of Anarcho-pacifist poets at the birth of the San Francisco Renaissance, Richard O. Moore presents his second book, Particulars of Place. The title poem is a meditation on life in the twilight of American Empire, posing the question of how to live in an age of endless warfare. Throughout, Moore's commitment to social justice mingles with his interest in Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy, resulting in a poetic amalgam unique to Moore himself. Reflecting a lifetime of devotion to the art of poetry, Particulars of Place confirms Moore's paradoxical position as a newly emerging old master.