Tech certainly hadn’t helped;
chlorpyrifos;;—
cities eking out funds,
people sleeping in tents
with black & white dogs & children;
racist prisons—you’re
getting numb to the list—“growth
in the service sector”—
women working three jobs—production
of power
& that tone in the
profit voices when you call customer service
growing slightly more officious
suspecting the next “downturn”—
you wake with nano-minutes
of stress built up overnight—
offshore breezes, fear of fires—
mosses bunched , , , ,,,
, , , ,,, , near the small oaks (did
they fear stone?)
Women had experimented
for centuries with too much cortisol—
so, what to do now, since doing
was the problem— It was just
mainly important to get
through the day (“A Slightly Less Stressful Walk Uphill”)
California poet, editor, teacher and activist Brenda Hillman’s eleventh full-length poetry
title,
In a Few Minutes Before Later (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 2022) [see my review of
Pieces of Air in the Epic (Wesleyan,
2005) and
Practical Water (Wesleyan, 2009)
here], a title, as she offers
to open her dedication, that was “composed between 2016 & 2021, half before
& half during the pandemic.” Sitting at two full pages, her point-form extended
list of dedications includes numerous individuals, creatures, geographies, punctuation
and ideas, and even a list of numbers; how many books, let alone poetry books, include
dedications to lists of numbers or punctuation? Set in six numbered sections—“In
Landscapes of Stress & Beauty,” “Activism & Poetry—Some Brief Reports,”
“There Are Many Women to Cherish,” “For Writers Who Are Having Trouble,” “The Sickness
& the World Soul” and “In a Few Minutes Before Later”—Hillman furthers her
exploration through a poetic of lived action, offering up a lyric that contends
with and articulates her activism on numerous fronts, comparable to similar
works by
Vancouver poets Stephen Collis and
Christine Leclerc, or
Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier. “Days are unusual.” she offers to open the first poem
in the collection, “Micro-minutes on / Your Way to Work,” “The owl sends / out
5 zeroes from the pines / plus one small silver nothing.” As has been the case
through her books for some time, Hillman’s lyrics are large in scope, and
reminiscent, slightly, of the experimental lyric heft and lightnessess
contained in the later works of
the late poet CD Wright [
see my review of her final collection here], offering poems that skim, stretch and turn, all while
managing to lift the lyric well beyond its earthly bounds. Even her use of
punctuation, offering sequences of commas, pushing beyond not only the visual
element of text on the page but the actual fact of punctuating, holding, halting.
Pop pop pop pop. One can’t help but be affected by the placement of text upon
the physical page.
i saw the clouds go by in
used lab coats.
i heard the neighbor
looking for her cat.
The hour is come, the prophet wrote
The squirrel has no apocalypse, & shakes
a gravid branch—consciousness in high places…
(“[in the split gardens irrational hope]”)
She
writes interruptions, activism and “minutes of visible and invisible existence,”
tackling a world-view of a sequence of space both intimate and deeply personal.
She wants to live, after all, and she wants you to be able to live as well, offering
notebook scraps layered across and below ecological concerns and public declarations.
“The future was handsome before the power went out,” opens the poem “Poem Before
the Power Went Out,” “She wrote to say he was being nice [.]” Hillman’s poems always
provide the sense of something detailed, shaped; a layering of perfect detail,
through an ease of line that flows as easily as song. “Poets are often tired,” she
writes, as part of the poem “Among Some Anapests / at Civic Center.” Later in
the same poem, offering: “A terrible beauty is dead / & the sun was tender
upon us // We don’t think the hitting will work / A defensive time is made // A
poem is not a protest / Subject to history’s impress [.]”
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