Full Description
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.
Contents
I. THE FORESTS OF GRIEF & COLOR On a Day, In the World Whose Woods These Are We Think All-night Crooked Moonrise over Mountain Pines The Bride Tree Can't Be Read Brief Walk at Salt Point Park For the Lovers Abandoned in Sunlight During a Suite by Gaspar Cassadó Beneath a Dying Coast Live Oak [& heard a humming, like the] The Forests of Grief & Color The Before Sleep Kind of Everything Composition: Fringe Lichen: Tilde & Mãe Composition: Under Cypresses, Near Big Sur Of Monarchs Again, Especially the Stripes So, Bacteria Also Have Their Thunder Angrily Standing Outside in the Wind [Untitled Day] Species Prepare to Exist after Money Extra Hidden Life, among the Days Mountain Pond Landscape, in a Drought As a Sentence Leaves Its Breath Some Kinds of Forever Visit You The Bride Tree Lives Three Times In the Forest of Blue Aptitude II. NEAR THE RIM OF THE IDEAL A Short Rhyme for Amiri Baraka A Summer Song from Old Berlin Untitled & Translation to Portuguese Curl of Hair in a Drawer The Family Sells the Family Gun Describing Tattoos to a Cop Chicago Black Friday Protest Near Apple Crypto-Animist Introvert Activism To a Life Ended in Winter Hearing La Bohème after the March Near the Rim of the Ideal III. METAPHOR & SIMILE IV. TWO ELEGIES The Rosewood Clauses (An elegy for my father) Her Presence Will Live beyond Progress (An elegy for C.D. Wright) V. TWO PARKS A Poem for a National Forest A Poem for a National Seashore Acknowledgments & Notes
