Cascadia (Wesleyan Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Brenda Hillman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 22, 2001 | Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series

These poems use the geography of California as metaphor for exploring fundamental pressures and issues of everyday life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Eclectic, sometimes derivative, sometimes inspired, the latest from the prolific, mercurial Hillman (Loose Sugar, Death Tractates, etc.) spins a luminescent web of vivid, disjunctive lines into an uncertain whole. Geologists know "Cascadia" as the name for the land-mass that became the American West Coast: Hillman's serial mix of long and short poems links Californian geology, geography, history (a Gold Rush-era diarist named Shirley), continental philosophy, and personal experience: "Sentences dip/ down to the idea as wiggle rock-granite/ diving through other granite driving as we/ drove, not meaning to." Some poems are content with their lyrical verbal effects; others play with typography for effects that are energetic, familiar to readers of Susan Howe and Jorie Graham, and occasionally baffling: "Always confusing bridge and bride// ;;;?(), !.// How can you sleep with that train turned up all night." Hillman's longer pieces try hard to use plate tectonics, memory, motherhood, addiction, the typographical form of the page, and phenomenology as metaphors for one another the results can shine in single lines and stanzas, though they sometimes fail to cohere. Her big, ambitious project, and her breathtaking single phrases, will certainly impress some readers, but Hillman's best poems owe the least to her overarching cascade several beautiful, spare single-page works evoke California's Spanish missions; a sonnet brings Anna Karenina to the Y; and a provocative, elegant lyric declares, "an individual/ transgressive arrow/ is shot through everything." (Sept.) Forecast: As an editor of the California Poetry Series at the University of California, and as a poet-professor at the University of Iowa's MFA program, Hillman exerts a large influence even beyond her work. This book should do extremely well among poets and students, and should have special appeal to denizens of the West.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In Hillman's sixth collection, readers encounter a mature poet taking more risks with each successive volume. On a smaller scale, but with no less intensity, she does for her adopted state of California what Charles Olson did for the small town of Gloucester. In the opening poem, she gives herself a directive that will carry her through the rest of the volume, and readers would do well to heed it: "Easy on the myths now/ Make it up." Her tri-fold exploration encompasses geography, spirituality, and work, and she uses history to uncover a self that can be of use in this rapidly usurped environment. Thus, California's numerous missions provide a grounding in religion, while Hillman's meditations on landscape are prayerlike. But she does not overlook the state's dreaded aspects El Ni?o, earthquakes, the eroding coastline, the hopes of gold that ignited the dreams of so many, and the dioxins humans have inserted into the atmosphere. In these circumstances, words take on weight, so that naming is building. As in Hillman's previous work, technical innovations are as important as the subjects she chooses, though some of the purely typographical aspects seem a bit superfluous. Hillman's previous volume, Loose Sugar, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Not for the casual poetry reader, Cascadia is nevertheless highly recommended. Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 88 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan (October 22, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819564915
• ISBN-13: 978-0819564917
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,635,534 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Publishers Weekly does not understand original poetry!, December 8, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Cascadia (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

This next step in Hillman's evolution is phenomenal. If one were to carefully read Brenda Hillman's poetry from the debut to this wonderful book, a number of things the PW review says are certainly found to be false. Who are these people who write for PW, anyway? I have found the majority of PW reviews to be out of touch with American poetry. Derivative??? How can anyone call Hillman's poetry "derivative"??? Notice the review does not further elaborate on the so-called derivative nature of her work. I recommend avoiding PW reviews of poetry whenever possible! That said, Hillman's newest in places features some the best work of her career... my favorites are the poems that move from mission to mission and the poems that use marginalia shade-text in connecting geologic history to human history... what I see as post-modern intrusions of the world on the author as she seeks to construct a lyrical self that for these very reasons will not cohere. No one comes close to Hillman in letting in the small voice, the voice of the soul over the background noise of the microwave (see Loose Sugar as well in this regard). You don't read poetry like this except when Hillman publishes a new book... I know exactly what I am going to get when Billy Collins or Robert Pinsky write new books... constant self-imitation (and too bad they are imitating that which was originally derivative). THESE are derivative poets. Let me add Tony Hoagland to that list... his Donkey Gospel is one of the worst books I have had the misfortune to read. Tell me if these poets offer ANYTHING new to the poetic tradition! Forget comparing these poets to Whitman! I have actually read reviews comparing Pinksky's "The Figured Wheel" to "Leaves of Grass." Who wrote this? A reviewer of the caliber of PW whose poetry understanding spans from Whitman/Dickinson to Frost, usually skillfully skipping Stevens, Pound, Eliot, or Stein. Do you see the problem here? Without Lowell and Merrill and Meredith, Pinsky and Collins wouldn't know where to begin. Also, the review mentions the typographic experiments of Jorie Graham. And what would these be? An asterisk? Some numbering, the em dash??? WOW!!!!! HOW EXPERIMENTAL!!!! What Brenda does here is rightfully compared to Susan Howe, but leave Jorie Graham out of it. PW has obviously bought into a general mainstream conception of Jorie Graham as an experimental writer. If anyone would bother to read Graham carefully, they will see what a romantic derivative poet she really is. Hillman's typographic and punctuation experiments go so far beyond anything that Graham has done that it is laughable to make this comparison at all. Hey, I like what Graham does, but tell me, how interesting in a larger historical context is the concern with the soul as a separate entity from the body? How interesting are angels? Everything Graham has said on these subjects has already been covered by that giant Rilke. Read the Duino Elegies before you assess Jorie as an orginal. With Brena Hillman, we have epic ambition to push poetry to join geography and the individual. California, on the edge of the continent and doomed to sink into the sea, is the nexus of these worlds. To call Brenda Hillman derivative is to insult what is a highly original voice in contemporary American poetry. Get this book if you want poetry fresh, exhilirating, and meaningful to the 21st century.

PS... someone mentioned Brenda Hillman has never taught at Iowa. She does teach at St. Mary's, but she has also taught at Iowa (FYI :) ).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tellutectonic, March 14, 2005

By 

Tuor (Ithaca, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cascadia (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

"Cascadia" is as close to a perfect 10 on the poetic Richter scale as words can get. Like California, like the range of subjects, voices, stances, emotions, and thoughts here, her technical blitz sprawls over (falls in, widens, tightens, presses, fractures) multiple fault lines: typographic, lyric, narrative, polysyntactic. "Cascadia" is a choir where Hillman's "personal" voice rarely solos (as she writes in the title poem: "People think poets make poems / Poems make poems lying down"); mostly, it seems like the language, the psychic and material landscape, has upped and seized control in order to abolish it, get beyond to more interesting and urgent spaces. Every next poem has just shifted tonally and formally in radical ways. Reading here is like mountain climbing: it rarely gets easier, and the further you go, the less you can breathe, but the vista grows in blissful proportion. There are some tremendously difficult poems here, but they convey no coyness, posturing, pretension, self-regard, or anything but a metamorphic need to be as they are. At times Hillman has succeeded in reaching an egoless (or less-ego) based writing that doesn't leave the reader groping for purchase.

There are so many gorgeous complexities to this work that only whole volumes of prose could adequately explain. Lest that make it sound utterly impenetrable, be assured that no matter who you are, there is at least one poem here that you will love, and many parts of many others that will shock and salve you. Plurality is a guardian angel here, as is change-merge-flux. Echoes are ingrained everywhere of poetic voices as antipodal as Gary Snyder (in "Sediments of Santa Monica": "After the twentieth century these cliffs / Looked like ribbons on braids or dreads... We're still growing up but the stitches hurt Let us be / True to one another for the world / Easy on the myths now / Make it up Sleep well") and John Ashbery (in "Haste Makes Channing": "His cellphone was ringing into the mocha; / a general brightness-; (of xylocaine, or / in Donne's "The Relic," / the bright hair-) / Several trends inside the main idea."), Gertrude Stein (in "Shared Custody": "When a child is dropped off in front of the other parent's house she creates a / history of space and yellow hurrying in the unopposed direction as we / learn to read by hurrying meaning.... As x falls by prearrangement with the experimenters, yellow is unopposed. The / child, leaving the car, drops an alphabet on the path. y. e. l. Shaving of / yellow, central plaid, black from a fraction if she has been brave about / including the math.") and Wallace Stevens (in "Songless Era": "A fine ash obscured the sun. / Leaves grew large as rooms. / Stamped recreants strolled near the pond of wands.").

Like Cascadia, the prehistoric landmass that once bordered what was the sea of California, this book has slipped under in order to let something new become: under poetic convention, under the guile of the one-I'd lyric speaker that has dominated American verse (in the land of the blind...), under grammatical rigidity, under the gilding of our economy and into the taints and ravages of its origins as well as its ongoing, ever displaced and disappeared violence. "Cascadia" is a challenging, rewarding, vital, and powerful fusion of the ecological, the feminist, the linguistic, the theological, the historical, the personal, the geological, and the self-consciously poetic. It will take a great deal of time (of the most pleasurable kind) to fully explore its rich ranges.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry that is profound, turbulent, and impressive, April 9, 2002

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cascadia (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Cascadia is an ancient landform that preceded present-day California. Taken for the title of Brenda Hillman's collection of short lyrics, we are treated to a poetry that is profound, turbulent, and impressive. Glacial Erratics: The last ice age had been caused by a wobble./After it passed they made houses from stars;//Visitors would peer in/And see the tongs not slipping,//Roomsized pebbles having been moved far,//It's like this more/When we speak than when we write;//Loving thus we have been/Loved by ground,//The word being/A box with four of its corners hidden;//Everything else is round.