This exciting book offers many superb poems. But I am equally interested in finding a readerly stance by which to value some of the poems that I find problematic for their apparent tendencies toward politically pious self-congratulation. To dismiss these poems for their generalizing abstractness seems too easy a reliance on probably outmoded evaluative standards. So I want to try out an argument that the imaginative stances here are so powerful that we have to see the poems which I first criticized for their sentimental lyricism as in fact efforts to elaborate political contexts for situations which Hillman engages poetically. Hillman seems to believe that poetry shirks its social responsibilities if it does not at least try to address the suffering caused by natural disasters and social inequality. The poems know they are on fragile grounds as they seek generalized, yet apparently necessary forms of consolation. After all, even at its most empty, political rhetoric encodes various kinds of energies, from the electron to the will, that are emotionally central to our lives. And that makes it worth testing how experiments with political rhetoric might be correlated with socially aware poetry.
Given my interest both in praising Hillman and in articulating the challenge I see this work posing, my review will concentrate on two aspects of her new book. First, Hillman at her best honors, and even intensifies traditional modernist demands for concreteness. Perhaps no contemporary poet is better at relying on something close to prose description as a way of achieving lyrical power. This power stems from several sources: a mastery of sound effects, a capacity to load every descriptive element with imaginative resonance, a subtle metaphorical reach tying human and natural orders of being, and the enactment of an acute struggle to attune poetry to emotionally charged conditions of suffering. As in Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, the relations among sounds and the play of details evoke states in which the will seems to affirm what the mind characterizes.
But Hillman is not satisfied by fealty to any Modernist heritage. Indeed, this is the source of my dilemma. There are several poems in the middle sections of her book that for a modernist like me seem irritating because they do not sufficiently resist the temptation to rhetorical generalizations which give us too much of the righteous soul over the critical mind. The poems in these sections are still intensely concrete in their situatedness. But their emphasis is less on the direct experience of such situations than on exploring what a lyrical imagination can achieve when political circumstances seem resistant to lyrical ambitions. Perhaps the best Hillman can do as a responsible political poet is to elaborate fresh efforts which may produce attitudes that do not simply accept despair or, worse, indifference.
I
I begin by addressing the poems in this book I like best, mainly because I am familiar with how to read and to judge their compelling modes of intensity. This means emphasizing the first and final sections of In a Few Minutes Before Later. Here Hillman explores the capacities of domestic attachments to establish workable commitments of the will, ones governed not by belief but by forms of love that carry over into the need to address social issues. These poems insistently pursue the social virtues of prose while everywhere attending to the sonic and metaphorical intensities of the lyric. Consider first the final poem in the volume, “On Hearing the Golden Crowned Sparrow,” because this poem most effectively establishes Hillman’s way of defining a distinctive space for poetry’s efforts to dwell in the “few minutes before later.” This space is established by careful attention to the intricacies of the physical world. Hillman manages to suggest a metaphorical dimension to her details while refusing to settle for any overt analogical equation between description and projected significance. The conclusion can then provide a figure for these suggested ways of extending perception into imaginative involvement in the details. Ultimately these intensely concrete situations become vehicles for imagining a new kind of sociality for lyric poetry:
Half-sweet squeal
Sounds like one hearing aid placed on the table …
A song knows
more than one way
When the hills catch fire
this sparrow stays
(or returns
To the same bush each year—)
We loved each other
when we couldn’t love ourselves,
our life a time-shaped miracle
a new ash is covering the plants,
planet… plans::
the song’s enchantment has a grainy hunger
finishingly, seep-seep, nightly
finishing unearthbound, like a Saturday
Its broad eyebrows crowd its crown
When we are sad about poetry,
when the immortals can’t
be heard because of fire
this staggered sound. Split
splendor (about
our height, from the ground—) (177-78)
This poem strikes me as utterly moving in its intelligence. Notice first how the spacing of the poem partially constitutes its sense of immediate presence as well as its power to deflect attention from the fire, while not denying the threat. More important, the physical spacing takes on the metaphorical ability to support the poem’s final claim that the song establishes the height from which a human response is best elaborated. Ultimately, we see that this height is what the volume as a whole aims to make real, if by no means always safe. The first two lines intriguingly play with sound, but do not interpret its cause or shape. Then there is a quick leap beyond the presence of song to the knowledge it projects. Only then does the poem identify the sparrow as the source of the song by switching immediately to how the sparrow occupies the same space on each return. That switch produces a huge leap as the poet reaches out to include human love within the space of the song, because of the idea of faithful return. The fire will not prevent the sparrow or the lovers from returning to what provides a sense of home. That idea allows the poem to shift to the presence of the song, now an intimate ally of a poetry also capable of stretching out the few minutes before later. There need be none of the rhetorical afflatus that may arise because of the dangers posed by the fire’s violent indifference to everything the sound evokes.
In fact, the fire is underplayed. It gets quickly reduced to ash that covers the plants, while opening up the poem’s capacity for empathy. “[P]lants,” “planet,” and “plans” are all alliterating simple prose names which do not need elaboration, because their interrelation is primarily achieved as a broadening of aural space, hence stretching the time capable of delaying “later.” These details are then asked to provide a kind of moral at the end, which I think is saved from sentimentality by the return to the “unearthbound” nature of the sound.
Sound has all the power to counter, for a moment, everyone’s fear of the fire, while offering a site for sharing anxieties and identifying with a community. Placement of the sound in space ultimately grounds the rich metaphoric recognition that the sparrow’s song shares “our height from the ground.” That figure is striking in large part because of how it avoids even Keatsian metaphoric subsumption of the bird into pure song in ideal space. Instead the poem insists on a simple alliance between bird and lovers. There is a metaphoric resonance to “ground,” but it is beautifully subdued by the stress on the literal site of the aural effects. Hillman obviously wants the sound to be more than physical detail. But she achieves that supplement largely by focusing on the significance of this shared distance from the ground. The sounds of the sparrow by themselves will not change anything. Yet they can promise an allegiance with a nature more reliable than a poetry devoted to the sad dispersal of immortal overtones.
Look again at the final three lines:
This staggered sound. Split
splendor (about
our height, from the ground--) (178)
The alliteration becomes virtually metaphoric in filling out and naturalizing the spacing. And the sound figure is followed by simple assertion that makes explicit and literal the final synthetic thematic statement. This is lyric naturalism trying to sustain the importance of hope by the poem’s ability to perform roles that a grander rhetoric would make suspect or never notice, perhaps like the the hearing aid on the table, a casual introductory detail mobilized only at the ending.
Other poems clarify how that sociality of the middle ground consoles us in the face of destructive forces that threaten to extinguish lyrically charged moments of attention. In the opening poem, “Micro-minutes On Your Way to Work,” the title of the book takes on substantial resonance because of the concrete way that the delay putting off “later” comes to constitute a plausible version of the once much-derided ideal of presence. Here the sense of presence is based on filling out moments in time. Intricate relationships demand our attention in the moment and in the flow of time. This attention blossoms as we fully accept our relationship to other beings. And acceptance is realized primarily by the poem’s stress on intricate relations among sounds, grounded in the remarkable ways that the lines take on weight, a great vehicle for putting off the state of “later.” Consider the dense echoes in the sounding of the opening lines, with each monosyllabic noun a focus of weight. Then nouns progress to verbs and the sense of time expands into a capacious “quilt of questions” that moves fluidly into the mode of lyric acceptance that I want to emphasize: “one thought / mixed with no thought, packed with light” (3).
This is the mind willing to enter and expand conditions of daily experience. The poem can define sources of hope and change when confronting general social problems. And this is the mind which in the following poem, “A Slightly Less Stressful Walk Uphill” can envision the force of minutes “moving roundly” from within rather than forming a straight line, “lengthwise,” directed only by pressing demands. Round movement supplants any “note” that might be “singled out,” so that the poem can constitute an experience that is not “wasting poetry’s time.” Such movement simply refuses to be driven by the demands for progress and distinct practical purposes now virtually inescapable for Western culture.
It is striking that Hillman’s sense of active spirit does not involve claims for transcendence. For Hillman, spirit is simply an extension of our awareness of what is there in the nature we experience, and in our natures as capacities for experience. The idea of a middle space shared by sparrows and humans sustains a quest for a lyricism anchored entirely in prose observations and reflections. I could elaborate this point by turning to the poem I consider the most moving and capacious version of this middle space, “& After the Power Came Back”—and not just because the title directs readers to the space and time of fulfilled promise. Here the ampersand becomes a means of extending the domain of active experience. Similarly, it is important to notice how Hillman manages to resist allowing simple nouns like “power” to be exhausted by their literal meaning, yet at the same time refusing to evoke extensive metaphoric elaboration.
But “A Goodness that Comes from Nothing” seems more important for my argument, because that poem best provides an example of Hillman’s commitment to attention as transforming the temporal into what can make itself manifest “before later.” The opening of the poem beautifully stretches time and suggests meaningfulness (rather than meaning) by a gorgeous play of strong vowels announcing an afternoon moonrise, followed by reference to an addressee’s walking that spreads both into the scene and into tense social relations, perhaps in a conversation with herself. The poem resolves with the voice accepting the resolution offered by a “for now,” supplemented by an openness to “sometime” that leads nowhere beyond itself—a place not tormented by self-consciousness. It suffices to be able to make “a little doorway / in the air” (12) for attending to beauty and struggle at once. Likewise, “Right Before Dusk, Some Meadow Fragments” develops this contrast between meaningfulness and meaning by fostering a comparison between cognizance of our own limitations and “snow mirroring something inexactly” (9). This inexactness becomes its own form of exactness in two registers—the simple act of sharpening attention and the possibility that a sense of common purpose need not depend on articulable principles.
II
Yet there remains the problem of interpreting how such intense concrete experiences can take on practical significance in our lives. The contemporary world seems to demand more than the appreciation of intricate imaginative involvement in details. And paths for meaningful action require more than the intelligent restraint and the reliance on sensuous lineation of the first section. Entering the social world seems to require the possibility of discovering direct consequences produced by imaginative writing. But there remains a huge gap between the sense of necessity and any confident response to what fosters that sense. In sections II-V, Hillman has to face the insistence of this demand, driven by a self-consciousness oriented not only to experience but also to where she stands politically in relation to events she engages.
Consider the poem “Activism and Poetry: a Brief Report : :: :: :” as an example of her testing in these middle sections of the volume how she can supplement the vitality of imagination in the opening poems while extending her field of attention to pressing social problems. In these poems, she seems to fear that allowing herself to indulge in the sonic and attentive pleasures of poetry will seem prove an evasion of what the world solicits from people sensitive to all that we know has gone wrong.
In these poems, Hillman is increasingly aware of how the inflexible language of political passion threatens to consume the domain of poetic experience. The poems now seem continually to ask how the poet can expand the sensibility so deft at description into frameworks capable of elaborating ways of addressing the suffering fundamental to contemporary social life. Hillman’s basic answer to this question seems to me groundbreaking. Rather than trust in political rhetoric, she understands the poem’s involvement in politics as a somewhat desperate effort to explore what difference a sensibility attuned to pacifist values can make in a world almost deaf to any kind of loving relations among living creatures. If she must fail, she will have given all of her intelligence and capacities of will to the struggle for effective commitment that she makes present.
These efforts to come to terms with political and social issues occupy four sections of A few Minutes Before Later, all devoted largely to deepening the ominous possibilities of what “later” might involve. The titles give a sense of the range of issues that seem to demand her developing various complex attitudes to the world she inhabits: “Activism & Poetry—Some Brief Reports,” “There Are Many Women to Cherish,” “For Writers Who Are Having Trouble,” and “The Sickness & the World Soul.”
Let me specify some threads among the sections. “Activism and Poetry” stresses the general shifts in poetry one must make if there is to be a plausible activism based primarily on a sense of interconnection among all living beings. Perhaps the best poem in this vein is “The American Burying Beetle,” because it illustrates how poetic satisfactions can reside in entomology’s ways of naming. These acts of naming ultimately provide a beautiful figure for how in nature there are even ways of “remaking the dead,” and so reversing what “later” usually means. “6 Views of Moss Dendroalsia” employs intricate typography in order to elaborate the processes by which these mosses talk to the sky and face up to drought. And “Activism and Poetry—Some Brief Reports,” emphasizes surprisingly concrete processes through which varieties of species can inhabit the planet in mutually satisfying relations.
Yet there remains the nagging sense in this section that relying on calm, intelligent acts of attention to complex ecological connections cannot suffice for engaging the problems confronting us all. The poems have to recognize the demand to be “polemical” because “there’s not much time” (39). It seems necessary that the poet use every possible form of activism—linguistic and political—in order to demonstrate how poetry can put off this ominous “later.” But offering these demonstrations involves the risk of rhetorical overkill that might be destructive to the very sense of mutual connection basic to Hillman’s world view.
Hillman most directly displays her self-consciousness about the risks of activism in the powerful poem “In the Gardens of José Martí.” Here she presents the poet as a “starving cat / eating stolen food” from the fingers of the group made up of political allies. Great image—in part because she has to recognize that it proves all too easy for the starving cat to get fat on the kind of food which the sense of speaking for a community can provide.
Perhaps the cat can evade that danger by testing capacities of that stolen food to provide political sustenance. This test becomes literal at the end of “1967,” probably the most ambitious poem in the volume. This superb poem beautifully fleshes out its simple comprehensive title. The poem is “about” then and now, with living memories of endless politically charged details around the funerals of Aretha Franklin and John McCain. Franklin’s call for “Respect” brings the concrete scenes into a present that is ravaged by the various forms of devastation caused by climate change, Covid, and, more generally by the fragile economy produced by neo-liberal principles like those of McCain. The poem speculates on the possibility of a new way of organizing the imagination in accord with the free play of electrons that nonetheless do significant work. But while the details of pain, devastation, and the contrasting comforts of Franklin’s music are sharply realized, the poem’s focus on a far-reaching range of details powerfully renders the scope of devastation without providing any extended focus capable of producing depth and compassion. There is very little of the intense imaginative elaboration of particulars carried over from the first section of the book.
Hillman seems to recognize the problem in a statement near the conclusion of the poem that I take as the emblem for these middle sections of the volume:
It is not safe to look at your phone while walking.
OK change the tone, tired Brenda & give the readers hope.
Humans have radiant intelligence, they have a chance,
Say: no one is like you.
Say: we need others badly.
Say: The alleged left has no heroes now
that’s why our heroes are electrons & …
We wrote in our diaries & kept
excellent records, backward
forward history & beside, R-E-S-P-E-C-T—
Aretha was teaching people how to spell.
The gulf between saying and spelling on the one hand, and global warming and environmental devastation on the other, is intensified by presenting Franklin as an emblem for a possible future. It seems fairly easy to take this passage as representing the failure of Hillman’s effort to build a compassionate politics by focusing on how poetry can sharpen attention and produce feelings for the plights of other people. But one can also see the implied self-criticism of the pathos in this passage as an emblem of Hillman’s effort to build a social poetry that admits failure but not defeat. Hillman seems to recognize the painful gulf between poetry’s powers of naming and its inability to offer much more than recognition and compassion. But at least she feels and names the apparent impossibility of a task that for her poetry must continue to attempt. Victory comes not in the effective result but in the compassion possible among those who will not give up trying. And perhaps the trying makes possible small successes, like the reassertion of abortion rights in places one had to fear would turn against them. To rest in states of lyric attention would fail to honor how idealization of all sorts may be basic to the imaginative labors producing poetry. To pursue a language of hopeful possibility may be our only relief from surrender to what history seems to demand.
III
Poetry’s difficulties in providing effective means of addressing the social world leads to an intriguing transition to Hillman’s third section, with its focus on the sustaining achievements of other women who also occupy “our height from the ground.” Here the poems do not directly engage political suffering but concentrate on how imagined intimacy with other women provides encouraging examples of compassion. For Hillman, “the infinite stress of human love” is the only force that may prove stronger than our destructive pursuits of self-interest.
But my worries remain that even this sense of heroic effort to redeem what we might call the prose of people’s lives seems woefully inadequate to the scope of the problems Hillman engages. So it is virtually impossible not to slip at times into a poetics of rhetorical gestures offering easy generalization. Consider the closing segment of “Lines for the 19th Amendment Centennial”:
We fed refusal to the storm to live
in the dream in revolt in realism. (73)
The opening line is superbly condensed: refusal to act would become just part of the storm, part of how history suppresses spirit. Then the sequence of the second line nicely subsumes the dream into a hope that it also provides a workable realism. There is a kind of realism based on simply acting with full commitment to a person’s fullest possibilities for engaging history. The necessity is in pursuing the action, whatever the result. Yet in the face of the storm that the poem presents, we are fed only what seem to me self-congratulatory nouns with little precise content, apart from the desires embodied in the poems. One can understand the desperate need for an alternative to the storm. But this pandering to very abstract versions of what is claimed to be realism simply does no political work. It only reinforces the need for self-justification focused on intentions rather than plausible actions.
Yet I do love the way the final two poems of this section return to Hillman’s greatest strength, that of bringing nature into collusion with human emotional states. And the “[collage essay]” beautifully introduces photography to intensify the forms of attention to the face articulated in “History of Punctuation on the Face.” The two poems taken together provide a stunning example of how attention to female physicality can result in love and memory, which in turn replenish our lives.
These two poems also provide intricate transitions to the next section, “For Writers Who are Having Trouble.” Again, the most moving passages for me occur in poems which attend directly to the density of relations among creatures caught up in natural processes. “The Scattering of the Lyric I” provides a brilliant enactment of the collapse of that “I,” only to produce terms for dialectically accepting a condition “whose music is absence, / whose dream is a weapon” (99). “A Feeling Right Before the Feeling” is even better, because it so intensely makes the struggle with “later” a means of suggesting a different way of focusing on one’s relation to lyric possibility. And I love how “Winter Song for One Who Suffers” constructs an image of a soul who “can crouch/ a long time while the heart / expands to reach its edges” (111). Here lyric possibility resides in allowing unknowing to be an aspect of lyric construction. Fascination with chance occurrences, in the flesh and in the mind, may provide openings to admiration and to love that cannot be realized when agents rely on fixed habits. Indeed, this openness to surprise may be the basic way that love can emerge in the form of a call rather than the discovery of an occasion smugly celebrating the eternal virtuousness of the lover.
But as the situations become more threatening and oppressive, it becomes more difficult for poetry to correlate private needs with potentially effective public stances. One inventive solution is to rely on the wonderfully flat prosaic sentences of “Concerning the Meaning Molecule in Poetry.” These sentences test the value of the advice given to Hillman when she was young: “if you write poetry / keep your subjects small.” Here the relevant meaning of “molecule” turns out to be a casual encounter with the call of a dove pretending to be an owl. This moment of acute attention eventually expands into a state warranting practical generalization:
When a radiant instance of the unknown
paused our bafflement but kept
that little meaning absolutely elusive and erotic … (97).
Yet Hillman seems to ignore this advice entirely, in order to honor the urgencies expressed in “Dear emerging, pre-emerging, and post-emerging poets.” Here the poetry sounds like prose seeking to escape its limitations by something close to empty abstraction. At best this poem offers a moment when Hillman seems aware that the need to give advice elicits confident assertions that one wishes one could entirely believe.
The fifth section of the volume is probably the most painful in the book, and for me the most severe test of my hypothesis about Hillman’s quasi-epic ambitions. She asks, in effect, how can the poet not try to offer general wisdom when the lack of balance between “The Sickness & the World Soul,” sadly made visible in the pandemic of 2020, seems to pervade social reality. But one also has to ask if such wisdom is compatible with ideals of lyric, intensifying what she calls “that little meaning absolutely elusive and erotic.” Hillman’s answer seems to be to shift the focus of poetry from evocative encounters with the world to the status of her own efforts to extend what lyric poetry can afford as compassion with and direction for dealing with social reality.
I think the best way of bringing out the dramatic self-consciousness at work here is to begin with my initial modernist discomfort with this section. Then we can explore what I missed in my initial reading and try to identify with what a contemporary political poetry has to deal with. Take, for example, my reaction to “[at a hospital: in the east],” because the poem ends with abstract nouns in order to capture the weight of social crisis and the demand that makes for some kind of mutual forgiveness:
& the ragged world soul
goes about its business
crisis of history,,
throng of forgiveness
3-19-20 244, 517
4-16-20 2,116, 698 (117)
The hospital of the title and the white moth offer the only concrete situations. The ending then can only gesture toward some kind of vague moral for grappling with this future, even though what “history” means and even what “forgiveness” entails depend on embedded social assumptions. But now I ask myself if such generalizations can be read as profound gestures which acknowledge the inevitable pathos when one has to wring some kind of ethical possibility out of this devotion to the “business” of living.
In retrospect, my impatience is now even more annoying to me in relation to another poem apparently easy to judge as faulty. “[in the spilt gardens irrational hopes]” offers lovely concrete figures in its opening moments and establishes a clear action involving her helping “elders and inmates.” Then the poem raises the stakes by concluding with two competing voices. One asks to what end are the poet’s efforts at nobility directed since “the system is sick.” The other voice, “between mystery and meaning,” is not spoken but made present by the landscape as a recompense for her efforts:
inexhaustible light
has entered us, sufferer, right out
to the sea of gray stars— (123)
Nice image. But there is a big difference between asserting a space between mystery and meaning, and clarifying in what that betweenness consists that makes it a comfort to us. It is tempting to conclude that this verbal gesture seeks profundity, but risks mere sentimentality. Yet Hillman probably thinks that risk is worth taking, because hearing that second voice can modify sensibilities, especially given the alternative of being tempted to settle for meaning, which is perhaps to settle for nothing that matters.
Now one probably has to say either that the poem simply gives up or that the poem treats as its focus the necessity of giving up and learning from that necessity. Such giving up can be profoundly moving, if one thinks of the gesture as realization that poetry does not have the necessary resources here to do anything but register a sense of helplessness. Perhaps rather than seeking to engage the situations by rhetorical means, Hillman wants to dramatize how being driven to such rhetoric serves as a contrast to poetic situations which offer consolation and even a new direction for self-consciousness.
At times the poems in this section totally convince me that their risks are worth taking. “[poem on a birthday::: in shelter]” is all generalization, but with a controlled sparseness that becomes almost like a Buddhist meditation (although for me the various bizarre punctuation marks mystify rather than fascinate.):
encountered nothing (destroyed that)
encountered never (destroyed that) (124)
It is not clear what caused this emptying of space and of time. But that is simply what the aftermath of destruction seems to be. I want to conceive this destruction as also cause of hope in what may emerge. But I think Hillman is wiser in seeking consolation by finding value in the sense of the “nothing” and the “never” that occupy the present but fail to suppress her commitments.
IV
The final section of the volume turns from global pandemic to global climate change as it emerges in the threat of wildfire in the San Francisco Bay Area where Hillman lives. Various domestic spaces then provide the testing grounds for what erotic love and friendship can establish in the face of the threat nature poses when human activities disrupt its orders. The poems seek consolation. But they also try to inspire a sense of dignity and quiet recompense for those experiencing pain and fear. Instead of concentrating on the ecstasies of erotic love, these poems emphasize how lovers can treat the ordinary world, as in Kierkegaard, as a site of blessing.
In these poems, Hillman evocates the tenderness that flows from intimate relations with family and friends as they grapple with concrete social issues. Throughout this section, we find a gripping interplay between the banal and the profoundly felt, with the prosaic inescapably woven into intricate musicality, partially figured in echoes of June Carter’s song “Ring of Fire.” The music reinforces the possibility of finding intensity in the prose of one’s life, without despairing about that discovery.
Some of the rhetoric here speaks a wisdom that seems profoundly undramatic and a tad too self-congratulatory. These lines concluding “During an enchantment in the life” seem not prose redeemed by a sense of poetic placement, but poetry too hungry for the expansiveness of easily generalized truism:
Their baffled voices melting our wax walls
with a candle, the ones who understand
what being is—the glowing, the broken,
the wheels, the brave ones—
they have their courage
you have yours,,,,
when you meet the one you love,
it is so rare. When you meet
the one who loves you, it is extremely rare. (166)
But many of the other poems manage to make prose description and even generalization do the work of lyric poetry in ways more striking and more powerful than almost all of Hillman’s contemporaries, especially when these contemporaries settle for conventional lyric strategies constructing imagined situations charged with imaginative resonance. In “Love and Myth,” plain speech marries sounds in such a way that the poem approximates a classical epithalamion. And in “Escape and Exeunt,” wildfires and lightning test how one can come to terms with the need to flee. Hillman eventually turns to her sleeping husband and presents to him a vision of a later moment which internalizes and reverses all the destructive force of fire: “& we will hold hands at dawn” (152). The poem simply puts faith in the lovers holding hands, which accounts for why “dawn” here cannot be treated as simply a descriptive term.
I also love “Epithalamium for Anxiety & Energy” for its ways of self-consciously linking the play of vowels to the use of the present tense, leading to a refusal to surrender to various forms of violence. But “The ground of being is changed” is probably Hillman’s most articulate recasting of her commitment to both descriptive and generalizing prose as a ground of lyrical affect. The possibility of poetry in the handling of such commitments earns the final line’s blend of aural density and an utter semantic simplicity. The result is a clear affirmation of how love sponsors commitments to action that will not give in to despair:
What gives calm joy?
a presence beyond
peril, bringing
the don’t choose to
boundary layers pulled back:
,,, ,,,
mosses crouch
in their assembly
unmourning the morning;;
a robin’s
arrows spin over them
from the mouth of time;;
in a few minutes
before later
at the ground of being
breaching nothing
where methane’s
wheel can’t reach:
love’s neighbor,
fond knowledge, no
stranger, not mourning
earth’s life,
life’s earth, love’s life
stronger than danger— (153)
Charles Altieri is unhappily retired after 53 years of full-time teaching, the last 28 of which were spent at UC Berkeley. He is the author of many books and articles, the last two of which he hopes more people will read: Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory (University of New Mexico Press, 2021) and Literature, Education, Society: Bridging the Gap (Routledge, 2022).