Brenda Hillman
Wesleyan University Press ($22.95)

by Erin Lyndal Martin

In the year 6939, a time capsule buried as part of a 1939 World’s Fair exhibition is scheduled to be opened. Since the contents were cataloged and much of the element of surprise will be gone, it is difficult to estimate how much interest this will garner. Will it be the doll and thread or the vial of seeds that holds meaning to the people of 6939?

As in time capsules, one never knows what references or tonal registers will date a poem and which will prove timeless. Brenda Hillman took this risk at the outset of her recently culminated tetralogy of poetry collections, each volume using one of the four elements as its cohering device. A staunch nonviolence activist and member of the women’s anti-war group Code Pink, Hillman could not have predicted the world events that would occur during her writing of the quartet, and the urgency with which she addresses current global concerns is palpable. That urgency becomes increasingly visible as the reader moves from 2001’s Cascadia (which is focused on California and includes a number of poems about the California Gold Rush) to Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), Practical Water (2009), and now Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which takes on metaphysical conceits while also wrestling with a slew of contemporary evils.

In Seasonal Works, perhaps the friction between the ephemeral and the eternal are the two timbers that give way to spark. A year before its publication, Tony Hoagland, addressing Hillman’s oeuvre thus far in American Poetry Review, posed a question that remains relevant: “Hillman’s work brings into relief one of the central poetic questions of our era—are the profits and burdens of self-consciousness worth it? In what ways does avante-gardish self-consciousness gratify and/or debilitate the work of poetry?” My lingering question is similar: Do the risks Hillman takes in creating a time capsule pay off? Like Practical Water, which name-checks Sarah Palin, Seasonal Works employs ultra-contemporary lingo via references to “Facelessbook,” Monsanto, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Halliburton, and many other institutions that situate the narrative within the extremely present moment, thereby risking some shelf life. However, Hillman also deploys a snippet of Hopkins (“dearest freshness deep down things dearest freshness”), includes an ekphrastic poem on a piece by the fifteenth-century ikon painter Andrei Rublev, and mentions the Latin name of almost every organism she describes throughout. “This is where poetry can be helpful. Poetry goes past the limit. It makes extra helpful nerves between realities,” she writes in “Experiments With Poetry Are Taken Outdoors.” Poetry, Hillman seems to be saying, is as relevant as ever and will be as relevant as we let it be.

Hillman’s self-awareness has historically expanded to her use of form, with which she has experimented throughout her career. In Seasonal Works, the storylines are a bit easier to follow than they were in books like Cascadia. “I was being a little transgressive with the narrative impulse in both this book and the last because there is a big prejudice against narrative poetry in some communities,” Hillman said in a chat with The Rumpus Book Club. Asked to follow up on this remark, Hillman commented: “The narrative impulse at times has great appeal, and it isn’t just one thing—a block of rendering events. I don’t find use of narrative or emotion or story incompatible with experiments, innovations, concepts—in form, subject, syntax, and so on.” Even though the stories are rendered with a more linear nature here, there are still plenty of swing margins, em dashes (the whole book ends on one), and other techniques more often found in so-called experimental poetry. One particularly striking move is Hillman’s rendering of the same poem in both verse lines and prose poetry (“A Quiet Afternoon at the Office”). This telling and retelling, printed on facing pages of the book, forces the mind to think back upon its own traces, seeing what stands out in each version and ultimately forcing a closer look at both.

This desire to revisit the poem’s beginning carries through to the cycle as a whole: at the end of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, a thorough reader can’t help but feel compelled to crack open Cascadia, knowing only now what Hillman would find to put in her time capsule.

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Hannah Gamble
Fence Books ($15.95)

by Mark Eleveld

Hannah Gamble’s first book of poems, Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast, was selected by Bernadette Mayer as a National Poetry Series winner. Told in three sections with a wide breadth of lyricism, the poems focus on gender, family, and the idea of aging, with a consistent reflection on relationships. The poems are engaging, thought provoking, and beautifully calm, with a dash of pensive regret.

Gamble’s poems are not breezy introspections, and reveal a signature combination of absurdity and pathos. Take “Everything That’s Alive Stays That Way”: “I asked my neighbor later / what it had been like to be alive before a time of war, / and he said it was funny / we even have a word for it, because everything / that’s alive stays that way / by tearing heat from the belly.” Although the tone does oscillate a bit throughout the book, her primary subjects seem never far from thought. In “Cocktail Party,” an absent father navigates to the poet’s mind: “The last time I saw my father alive / he was on his way to a cocktail party, wearing a tie / . . . just like the first time he went to a Rock & Roll Concert, / and his mother made him wear a three-piece suit.”

Contemporary poetry often spends too much time reflecting on the poem, the idea of the poem, the process of writing a poem. This is a danger that Gamble circumvents with her cleverly spring-loaded syntax in “Biotic/Abiotic”: “You moved around / me like a plastic daisy / on a plastic stem, spinning / in your yardwind. We never really / got it together. / . . . / I prefer poems, / but I understand that their human swell / is often troubling.” She continues to handle this topic masterfully in “How Early to Wake”: “Even when I was not being / a poet, I was deciding how early to wake— / how early to begin the business of approving / and disapproving of the shapes / I’d let my person take.”

The secret to Hannah Gamble’s charm lies in her uncanny ability to hold reality and a quiet, seemingly commonplace sadness squarely in her binocular-like vision. Her poems of quirky self-admonishment and effective disengagement are delivered in a style whose dizzying effects you are not likely to forget.

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Julie Marie Wade
White Pine Press ($16)

by Julie Babcock

In her debut poetry collection Postage Due, Julie Marie Wade investigates the line between poetry, prose, and ephemera to create a volume that illuminates the complicated interplay of personal memory and desire. Among lined and prose poems, readers can also find postcards and letters the writer has addressed to elementary school friends, enemies, and former role models like Mary Tyler Moore. The various forms highlight tantalizing acts of quasi-autobiographical performance, exploring questions about who affected the author in the past and what she wants to say to them now.

The book’s concept showcases Wade’s talent for writing about larger issues through surprising and personable details. For instance, in “Epiphany,” a poem about the ways in which Truth is often obscured by the strange rules of elementary school education, the poet moves from her own experiences to ask the reader, “Did you ever make a diorama? Perhaps from a shoebox & in the third grade?” Despite the question’s hyper-specificity, Wade knows most readers with a fairly standardized U.S.-based education will answer “yes.” These shared experiences illuminate other, more significant connections about what we are taught, what we experience, and the ways it affects us.

While the forms of the poems are engaging, there are times when the overall effect is less so. The poems work so much with episodic memory details that often the sense of present conflict is lost. “For Anna Shope, Who I Always Hated in High School” begins as an interesting confession about the speaker’s annoyance at Anna’s good grades and, more importantly, about the writer’s obsession with Anna’s looks and ability to get boyfriends. However, as the poem continues, both internal and external conflicts are erased:

We both graduated with 4.0s. You went pre-med, & I became an English major.

Are you a doctor yet? Am I a poet?

I’m not sure how the measure’s made, but I feel sure you’ll make it. And as for me & my weak knees: I’ve been kissed that way I once could only dream.

In many poems, including this one, the speaker relates past problems from a current position of relative privilege, and this perspective makes it difficult to understand what is truly at stake. Because the language is so conversational, this avoidance of current conflict is felt even more acutely, and the poems can frustrate in their lack of resonance.

The postcard poems that appear at various points in the collection create the most direct and affecting confessions, and they are also the poems where the conflicts are least resolved. The postcards to her mother and father, particularly, surprise and evoke a tension that is often pushed away in other poems. The book’s organization into four parts—“Lent,” “Pentecost,” Advent,” and “Epiphany”—adds another layer to the themes of confession and retribution that run throughout. Having also published two books of lyric nonfiction, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010) and Small Fires (Sarabande Books, 2011), Wade is clearly interested in experimenting with the line between autobiography and art; we can look forward to reading more from her and to watching her autobiographical performance continue to evolve.

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Lorene Delany-Ullman
Firewheel Editions ($18)

by Steven Wingate

Lorene Delany-Ullman’s Camouflage for the Neighborhood explores a subject of much recent national concern: the effect of militarism upon America, both collectively and in its citizens’ individual psyches. While this territory has been explored by writers such as Kevin Powers (The Yellow Birds), Brian Turner (Here, Bullet), Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk), Jehanne Dubrow (Stateside) and Siobhan Fallon (You Know When the Men Are Gone), Delany-Ullman brings to this conversation a prose poet’s eye for the way that many small parts, like individual strokes in a pointillist painting, fit together into a larger canvas.

Camouflage presents a sweeping vision of domestic militarism in America, reaching from Cold War Los Angeles—the epicenter of the military-industrial complex—to our contemporary era with its protestors, over-deployed soldiers, and peculiar blend of blind patriotism and self-doubt. To her credit, Delany-Ullman avoids taking easy political stances on the personal and social histories she examines. It’s not so easy to bemoan weapons when a family has “feasted on venison, bear stew, tender quail” thanks to a grandfather’s gun. Through concise vignettes, the poet builds a world that’s difficult to dismiss because we’ve gotten to know the people in it.

The person we get to know best is Delany-Ullman—or her authorial persona—whose life is steeped in military presence. We see childhood “duck and cover” drills at Cold War schools. We see America pre-Vietnam War, when the country didn’t question its military nature. We see a young woman fated, early on, to date and marry military men: “My Barbie tried to love G.I. Joe. But he had married war.” We see the spillover of violence into the domestic arena, with kids shooting air rifles at each other and partially blinding a homeless man with a paintball gun.

In Delany-Ullman’s vision, domesticity itself is subject to the constant threat of micro-scale military action. I don’t want to call it violence, because it isn’t random or emotional. Instead it’s organized and purposeful: “Sometimes only our dog was in the line of fire.” In the broader theater of the international world, war can break out at any time in any era—in Beirut, in Israel, in the heart of America with a dirty bomb—and the unity of those times and threats knits the components of this work together.

Stylistically, Camouflage for the Neighborhood is a straight-ahead book; its formal approach is classical (typically one flush-left stanza/paragraph per poem) and its language does not seek to dazzle inordinately. Because it is so centered on individual experience, one can read it as an extended lyric essay. It is this very slipperiness that makes Delany-Ullman’s work a notable contribution to the growing literature of American militarism in all its faces—some angry and wrathful, some protective and loving, some adrift but forging ahead nonetheless.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2013/2014