Ernest Hilbert - Böcker

In poems that celebrate survival and renewal, Ernest Hilbert summons the ageless conflict between human affection and the passing of time, recognizing that all we love must eventually disappear. Tender poems of fatherhood weigh against unsettling explorations of natural dangers and intimations of bodily harm. From porn sets to seedy gun ranges and heavy metal tribute nights in crumbling theaters, Hilbert’s eye roves over the desolation and beauty of contemporary America, all the while feeling the irresistible pull of water—what Melville called “the ungraspable phantom of life.”

All of You on the Good Earth guides the reader through chambers occupied by visionary gravediggers and spaced-out movie stars, frenzied dropouts, sullen pirates, and unrelenting stalkers, noble war correspondents and cornered dictators, unlucky drunks and supercilious scientists, impatient goddesses and sad sea monsters, self-indulgent denizens of Plutonian strip-clubs and earnest haunters of ancient ruins, the infamous Rakewell in TriBeCa and sea nymph Kalypso in a beach house at the Jersey shore, characters wandering an America demoralized by economic decline. These poems contain fasts and feasts, laments and love songs, histories, fantasies, and elegies, the amusing and heartbreaking debris of life on this world, all the while recalling Seneca’s dictum, non est ad astra mollis e terris via (\u201cthe road from the earth to the stars is not easy\u201d).

Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert's first book, Sixty Sonnets, contain memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate lives—failed novelists, forgotten literary critics, cruel husbands, puzzled historians, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, high school dropouts, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems ("My love, we know how species run extinct"), satires ("The way of the human variety, / Not even happy just being happy"), elegies ("The cold edge of the world closed on you, kissed / You shut"), and songs of sorrow ("Seasons start slowly. They end that way too"). The original rhyme scheme devised for this sequence--ABCABCDEFDEFGG--allows the author to dust off of the Italian "little song" and Americanize the Elizabethan love poem for the twenty-first century. Speaking at times in propria persona ("We'll head out, you and me, have a pint"), at times in the voice of both male and female characters ("I'm sorry I left you that day at MoMA"), at times across historical gulfs ("Caesar and Charlemagne, Curie, Capone"), Sixty Sonnets marshals both trivia and tragedy to tell stories of modern America, at last achieving a hard-won sense of careful optimism, observing "the last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored."