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- Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire
The final volume in the poet's extraordinary tetralogy on earth, air, water, and fire
Winner of the Griffin Poetry Trust's International Poetry Prize (2014)
Runner-up for the Northern California Book Reviewers Northern California Book Award (2014)
Fire— its physical, symbolic, political, and spiritual forms—is the fourth and final subject in Brenda Hillman's masterful series on the elements. Her previous volumes—Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water—have addressed earth, air, and water. Here, Hillman evokes fire as metaphor and as event to chart subtle changes of seasons during financial breakdown, environmental crisis, and street movements for social justice; she gathers factual data, earthly rhythms, chants to the dead, journal entries, and lyric fragments in the service of a radical animism. In the polyphony of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, the poet fuses the visionary, the political, and the personal to summon music and fire at once, calling the reader to be alive to the senses and to re-imagine a common life. This is major work by one of our most important writers. Check for the online reader's companion at brendahillman.site.wesleyan.edu.
I. ON THE MIRACLE OF NAMELESS FEELING
To Spirits of Fire
After Harvest
Some Kinds of Reading in Childhood
The Fuel of an Infinite Life
Grammar of This Life at Noon
Geminid Showers & Health Care Reform
Late Autumn Storms at Pigeon Point
At the Solstice, a Yellow Fragment
Early Sixties Christmas in the West
The Vowels Pass By in English
Something Has Been Reading the Fireroots •The Body Politic Loses Her Hair
In High Desert Under the Drones
Between Semesters, the Fragments Follow Us •We Saw the E Look Back
I Heard Flame-Folder Spring Bring Red
En Route to Bolinas, a Rose
In the Room of Glass Breasts
Equinox Ritual with Ravens & Pines
To Leon, Born before a Marathon
Fable of Work in the World
A Halting Probability, on a Train
In Summer, Everything Is Something's Twin
To Stem the Time We Spent
Facelessbook
Two Summer Aubades, After John Clare
The Practice of Talking to Plants
Ecopoetics Minifesto: A Draft for Angie
Foggy Animist Morning in the Vineyard
Previous Dawn in the Next Field
West Marin Night During Perseid Showers
For One Whose Love Has Gone
Patience Swoons in the Sword Ferns
Between the Fire & the Flood
Between the Souls & the Meteors
Moaning Action at the Gas Pump
Elegy for an Activist in Winter
Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways
Rituals with Food Before the Feast•After the Feast at Year's End
Report on Visiting the District Office
After a Death in Early Spring
Imperishable Longing to Be with Others
The Hour Until We See You
Till It Finishes What It Does
After a Very Long Difficult Day
A Spiral Tries to Feel Again
You Were in Sunlight Being Prepared
On the Miracle of Nameless Feeling
II A SENSE OF THE LIVELY UNIT
As the Roots Prepare for Literature
Summer Mountain Lightning & Some Music
The Elements Are Mixed in Childhood
At the Snow Line in Summer
Sky of Omens, Floor of Fragments
The Seeds Talk Back to Monsanto
Coda: Suggested Activism for Endangered Seeds
The Nets Between Solstice & Equinox
Very Far Back in This Life
To the Writing Students at Orientation
The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice
Local Warming & Early Autumn Butterflies
Halfway Through Civilization, Late to Another
Imitating a Squirrel at my Job
Experiments with Poetry Are Taken Outdoors
A Short Walk During Late Capitalism
A Quiet Afternoon at the Office
A Quiet Afternoon at the Office II
When the Occupations Have Just Begun
After The Orionids, Near the Plaza
From the Dictionary of Indo-European Roots
Short Anthem for the General Strike
Mists From People As They Pass
Types of Fire at the Strike
o—
o—o o—o—o o—o—o o—o—o
A Brutal Encounter Recollected in Tranquility
& the Tents Went Back Up
2 Journal Entries During Occupy SF
An Almanac of Coastal Winter Creatures
The Second Half of the Survey
Lyrid Meteor Showers During Your Dissertation
Poem of Hope, Almost at Equinox
Radical Lads, Blisters & Glad Summers
Mystical Lichen Falls Through the Fonts
Smart Galaxies Work with Our Mother
In the evening of the Search
Acknowledgments & Notes
BRENDA HILLMAN is an activist, writer, and teacher. She has published nine collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press, including Practical Water, for which she won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. Hillman serves on the faculty of Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California, as the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry.
"Brenda Hillman's latest poems blaze up like matches—they dance and flicker out by the bottom of the page ... Hillman's book reminds us that one of the functions of art is to disturb: to startle us out of the ossified, inflexible forms of the routine and conventional. In this, Hillman has a particularly American genius."
~Dana Levin, Boston Review
""I can think of no better recent poetry than Brenda Hillman's in its reach and ambition and serious play that widens poetic horizons [H]er latest book—visionary, political, and ecological—encompasses a dizzying number of layers as it warms, shines, threatens, and burns.""
~Michael Morse, Tikkun
""Hillman has created a book both masterful and sprawling, straightforward at times and experimental at others [It] warrants close attention, for being urgent political poetry and so much more.""
~Janna Knittel, Pleiades
""Hillman's devotion to social justice—her unwavering belief in poetry's capacity to address root causes of our political strife—ultimately purifies our fallen world in the languages of elemental fire.""
~Karen An-Hwei Lee, The Iowa Review
""Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire celebrates poetry as a mode of sheer delight in the kinds of being that are committed to finding pleasure and freedom and connection as elementary conditions of being in the world.""
~Charles Altieri, Open Humanities Press
""I love this book so I want to explore the grounds of my pleasures.""
~Charles Altieri, Open Humanities Press
""Brenda Hillman is like her poems—surreptitiously wild, wordy and replete with surprising confessions.""
~Lou Fancher, Contra Costa Times
""In Seasonal Works, perhaps the friction between the ephemeral and the eternal are the two timbers that give way to spark.""
~Erin Lyndal Martin, Rain Taxi online reviews
""Brenda Hillman possesses what many contemporary poets do not: both a political imagination and a poetic conscience. She does what Rosanna Warren says poets should do more often: she 'wrestles with the polis' Hillman's mystical imagination, her exacting intelligence, and her sensuous play with words on the page often leads to a Mallarmé-like magic. These poems are about vision; like the sinewy forms in Blake's cosmology, the elasticity of her poems require space, image, sound—well, it's a whole new universe. Bravely, Hillman will take you there.""
~Amy Pence, Colorado Review
""Brenda Hillman's latest poems blaze up like matches—they dance and flicker out by the bottom of the page Hillman's book reminds us that one of the functions of art is to disturb: to startle us out of the ossified, inflexible forms of the routine and conventional. In this, Hillman has a particularly American genius.""
~Dana Levin, Boston Review
""[A]n activist poetics that holds at its heart the obligation to renew the language and the world.""
~Jerry Harp, Kenyon Review
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