Customer Reviews

Cascadia (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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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 :) ).

"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.

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.

Margins are not, in this book, marginal, but have a potent, unsettling agency-"A left margin watches the sea floor approach." The peripheral is central is peripheral, and in some sort of symbiotic séance with geology Hillman slices sentences to reveal their difficult epoxy-"tearing up sentences / to make them clean"..." A merging subverts the categories / Some words shouldn't marry." This book is stretched like a canvas across this difficult (though ultimately liberating) truth-the only terra firma is found at fault lines, where the earth, like our lives/minds/worlds is unresolved, shifting-"experience has been sent up, at an angle." In places, the poems here are literally turned on their sides, creating something like the musical score of topography, the difficult brail of sight ("Sight stops other categories"). Hillman layers the continuous and the intermittent until causality is predominantly a question, complicated, until meaning is not a factory or strategy ("Creation doesn't fail though / the meaning sea dies."), but a generative opening, "a shade not resolved in the mind / because it is the mind."

Here, meaning escapes the cult of the individual-(enter: The "we"-)-the ploy of the cohesive subject / narrative / scene-for "This need to be unique / has mostly made us miserable." Yes, this book will cure you of your craving for control, for anything as dehumanizing as remote controls, pull the freak in you out on the street for a tete a tete talk, a walk through the flickering corridors, the disintegrating corridors, the doors that fall off as you open them. Hillman destabilizes the page by putting words like specimen jars in the corners ("unattached" to the poem), by invoking logograms, by post-performance script dribbling down the page, by the ghost phrases that sit in the bucket seats of the left margin (for ex: hydrangea pre-Naugahyde teabag Four Points Fresno song not anti-song I laughed or Formica kitchenette soap little soap), whisper through the bone china of the poem. "Of course there was no mother / lode; of course it was unlikely." These poems are haunted by evocative figures that you will not soon forget, that flicker like a blip on the screen, like a mistake. These poems recognize how "We wanted / the extraordinary stranger in our veins," a boy with mirrors in his spine (useless in their integration; scaffolding no tool) drifting, "the doomed forms, singing, `Toy sold separately'."

This is less a review and more a correction--Brenda Hillman teaches at Saint Mary's College of California, located in the town of Moraga, just over the hills from Berkeley. As of this writing (Jan.2002) she is in fact teaching at Iowa, along with Robert Hass, Cal Bedient, and Dean Young. She will be giving a reading at St. Mary's on April 25,2002, in the Soda Center, if anyone wishes to attend. She is one of the more wonderful people on the planet, and speaking from a student's point of view, a wonderful teacher. Speaking of originality, one of her favorite lines is, "A poor memory is a blessing." Make of it what you will.

In Cascadia, her sixth volume of poetry, Hillman conflates the individual body with the earth's body, and sets out to explore the overlapping geographies of each. This mission of the artist seeking to gain self-knowledge through observation of her environment is decidedly old-fashioned, and therefore posits a sublime counterpoint to this particular artist's stylistically innovative, experimental approach.

Hillman's concerns are varied and fascinating. She deftly incorporates environmentalist critiques of consumerism (el nino orogon) and colonialism (cascadia) into the text of the poems without once sounding preachy. She accomplishes this by keeping her poetic voice identifiable and down-to-earth, despite the technical acrobatics and her unmistakably unique vision of the world. The metaphor of gold runs throughout the book, both the physical gold that drew the prospectors of the California gold rush and the spiritual gold of alchemy. Through an exploration of the shared properties of earth and human, Hillman individualizes the history of the earth and historicizes the state of the individual, demonstrating how much we are related to our environment.

As early as in the first poem, Hillman compares "an old punk's Mohawk" to "evidence of inner fire," the same fire that she will describe as molten, gushing out of the earth. Later, she compares faultlines to fate lines on the palm of god's hand and, in the masterful Shirley Poem, begins with the statement "Physical earth reveals itself as persons." There is an almost mystical bent to this notion, though Hillman's writing could never be accused of the namby-pambyness, the mush and blandness that comes with most contemporary poetry that takes its ostensible inspiration from the same. She casts a sweeping gaze over geological time, (as in the title of the poem called The Formation of Soils, intentionally constructed to resonate as "souls"), and establishes the world of the book, the terms of it, through equations, like a chemist (the hand-drawn diagram in Birth of Lace) or an alchemist, the medieval mystic, the searcher of spiritual gold. In Fresno Lunette she actually uses an equal sign, writing Dirt = guts of a star. There is something fanciful, almost adolescent in that gesture, a thumbing one's nose quality and it's this flourish coupled with the rigorous scrutiny that Hillman obviously directs to her work that sets Hillman apart from her contemporaries and makes the reader sit up and take notice.

The poems of Brenda Hillman's Cascadia artfully interweave human moments, local history and geologic eons. Gorgeous writing, often deepy amusing, often groundbreaking in form. Touchingly relevant. "This was set down in strata so you could know / what it felt like to have been earth." ("A Geology")

This isn't meant to be posted as a review, merely to note a small factual error in the PW review (along with several typos) you have posted. Hillman doesn't teach at Iowa, nor has she. She teaches at a small school near San Francisco called (I think) St. Mary's.

What a talented poet brenda hillman is; full of brilliant phrases and keen perceptions, she's one of the few american poets who is culturally/politically observant and also authentically spiritual in her orientation. This is a potentially important and powerful combination of virtues, the poet all of us american readers and believers might hope for. Unfortunately, Hillman seems to be(I hope not) permanently infected with the experimentalist west coast poetics of fracture and obscurity; her poetry is increasingly marred by the coy mannerisms, the arid abstract occultations of the american left bank-- the result is that more and more of her poems are unreadable, and seem in fact made for that small audience of other "cool" hyper-intellectual, anti-representational poets; hillman is not the first poet to be misguided by a desperate desire to be thought of as ultra hip, but it's our loss too; the author of the resonant and lovely books bright existence fortress and death tractates has now written two unreadable collections, books which manage to be both over- and under-inflated at the same time. It's very frustrating. A cautionary tale: be careful who you go to cocktail parties with; you might get your head bent.