Brother Salvage

by Rick Hilles

Overview

The name of the title poem—“Brother Salvage: a genizah,” provides a skeleton key to unlock the powerful forces that bind Rick Hilles’s collection. A genizah is a depository, or hiding place, for sacred texts. It performs a double function: to keep hallowed objects safe and to prevent more destructive forces from circulating and causing further harm. Brother Salvage serves exactly this purpose. The poems are heartrending and incisive, preserving stories and lives that should not be forgotten. Yet, through the poet’s eloquent craft, painful histories and images are beautifully and luminously contained. Like scholars sifting through ancient genizahs in search of spiritual and historical insights, readers immersed in Brother Salvage will find, at the heart of the book, the most sacred entity: hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822959359
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	08/07/2006
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Rick Hilles teaches courses in poetry at Vanderbilt University. He has been the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and the Ruth and Jay C. Halls Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has received the Larry Levis Editor’s Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Salmagundi, and Witness.

Editorial Reviews

This reviewer was riveted by the Holocaust poems. It is said that the world must ‘remember’ or ‘never forget.’ How can that effectively prevent anti-Semitism or any other act of mass genocide? When humanity is mentally and emotionally touched to the core with realistic accounts, then perhaps they will be moved to do more than just observe and remark about an experience far beyond their knowledge. ‘Brother Salvage’ does just that.”
—Jewish Book World


"Rick Hilles should be commended for taking on the large and risky task of writing poems on various cultures and their political histories in this book. From the Holocaust to ancient Egyptian mysteries to the work of Paul Eluard, Hilles approaches complex dimensions of history in highly crafted and brilliant poems. He is successful because he gives himself the lyrical room and forms to succeed. Each poem is different, is structured in challenging ways, and resonates with the skill and talent of a young poet coming into his own and bringing the world with him." 
—Bloomsbury Review


”Shows the power of the narrative in poetry to remind us, in concise and elegant language, of our shared humanity. . . . Between Hilles’ mastery of Keats’ ‘negative capability’ and his command of language both elegant yet clear and clean, these poems and their narrators move before the reader’s eyes, engage and entice us to listen to stories that, no matter how large or small, deserve to be heard and treasured.”
—Ohioana Quarterly

From the Publisher

Hilles attempts to conjure what is lost from what is found, acknowledging that the artifact is "the cracked handblown glass, / and not its maker." His first full-length collection, winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, presents its title poem as a genizah, Hebrew for a hiding place for scriptures both holy and heretical. The poem, based on a Holocaust memoir, Seven Hells, by Dr. Tadzik Stabholz, dramatizes the time Stabholz spent in Dachau with a companion who did not survive, "a man neither brother nor relative." Recalling Richard Howard's admired dramatic monologs, Hilles's work unearths and reinvents its characters (historical pieces are interspersed with love poems and sequences that include "Flashlight Stories," a family recollection). In one poem, Egon Schiele speaks from his prison cell; in another, Catherine Blake, the widow of William, touchingly acknowledges that she is finally able to share her late husband's ecstatic visitations by receiving him: "Though/ mostly we speak of how best to market/ His engravings; only seldom do we revel in Eternity." These are rich and gentle poems; a fine debut. E.M. Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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