In a Few Minutes Before Later

by Brenda Hillman

Overview

"[Hillman's] work is fierce but loving, risk-taking, and beautiful." —Harvard Review

Finalist for the Four Quartets Prize, given by Poetry Society of America, 2023

An iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.

During an enchantment in the life


Do you love a living person
        absolutely? Tell them now.
In a half-unwieldy life you made, under
the hyaline sky, while the dead
        drank from zigzag pools nearby,
if they saved you in your wild incapacities,

        in timing of the world's harm
in a little pettiness in your own heart while others took
        your madrigals in shreds to a tribunal,
        when others said you should feel grateful
        to be minimally adequate for the world's
triple exposure or some tired committee...

        The ones who love us, how do they
break through our defenses?
        We're tired today. Come back later.
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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819501226
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	02/06/2024
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	617,626
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

BRENDA HILLMAN (Kensington, CA) is the author of 11 books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press. She has co-edited numerous books, including At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets and a recent recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for innovation in literature, she is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary's College of California and lives with her husband Robert Hass.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS • (dedication) • I. IN LANDSCAPES OF STRESS & BEAUTY • Micro-minutes on Your • Way to work • A Slightly Less Stressful Walk Uphill • Dawn Tercets with Blake & Nuthatch • Right Before Dusk, Some Meadow Fragments • A Goodness That Comes from Nothing • The Highest Part of the Dust • Poem Before the Power Went Out • Poem While the Power Was Out • & after the Power Came Back • [interruption: stichomythia] • People's Emotions in One City Block • After a Pageant, Before a Birth • Poem Describing Time to the Unborn • II. ACTIVISM & POETRY—SOME BRIEF REPORTS • The Times We Find Ourselves In • Activism & Poetry—a Brief Report : :: :: : • In the Gardens of José Marti • Notes outside West County Detention Center • [interruption: stichomythia] • Among Some Anapests at Civic Center • Wiping tear Gas off Young People • Report on Another Encounter in Nature • 6 Views of Moss Dendroalsia Abietinum • [interruption: stichomythia] • The American Burying Beetle • On the Molecules of Certain Ancestors • The Mostly Everything That Everyone Is • 1967 • III. THERE ARE MANY WOMEN TO CHERISH • Winter Daybreak Stanzas for Our Daughters • The Closing of a Midtown Bookstore • A Pattern of Minutes During Illness • For Students, After Reading the Odyssey • The Working Sister of the Muses • Lines for the 19th Amendment Centennial • [interruption stichomythia] • In Some Senses of the Word • Taking the Sunflower to the Mountains • After the Fires,,, In the Mountains,,, • S/kin • History of Punctuation on the Face • [collage essay] • IV. FOR WRITERS WHO ARE HAVING TROUBLE • A Feeling Right Before the Feeling • On Days When We Both Travel • [interruption stichomythia] • Concerning the Meaning Molecule in Poetry • The Child, Finishing Fourth Grade Online, • The Scattering of the Lyric I • The Photograph of the Black Hole • Her Map Might Change Its Arrows • [interruption stichomythia] • Dear emerging, pre-emerging & post-emerging poets, • For One Who Paused Her Writing • To the Poets of Myanmar • ::[an artist's sound, between the Farallones]:: • [interruption stichomythia] • Winter Song for One Who Suffers • V. THE SICKNESS & THE WORLD SOUL • ::: [a ragged white moth passes by]::: • [at a hospital: in the east] • [little breath circles all across town] • [: : : at equinox, same 12 squares, window : : :] • [stayed busy inside moments of not] • :::[the invisible is full for you]::: • [in the split gardens irrational hope] • [poem on a birthday::: in shelter] • [trance poem with the gray stone] • [asyndeton of adenine cytosine guanine uracil] • :::[when spring dusk        fills the garden]::: • :::[lines on Easter during the sickness]::: • [for the workers suddenly less employed] • ::[untitled]:: • :::[to the voice of the age]::: • ::[in a place with no light]:: • [ ________________ ] • :::[smooth black stone has seen everything]::: • [chiasmus with all the other animals] • :::[the voice of the age chorus]::: • [pinched nerve in my white arm] • [the hive interrogates the helpless hum] • [the fourth part of a triptych ] • [untitled tableau] • VI IN A FEW MINUTES BEFORE LATER • Escape & Energy • The ground of being is changed • Escape & Logic • Punctuation at the end of time • Escape & Song • Love & Myth • The Themes in American Literature • During an enchantment in the life • Escape & Speculation • Doubt & Love • Escape & Exeunt • Epithalamium for Anxiety & Energy

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[Hillman's] most recent books are rooted in broad social and ecological interests: 'passion' is a better term. She has invented a kind of dialogue with the earth; she writes with an intimacy and directness few equal and a magnificence of conception almost no one aspires to."—Citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Morton Dauwen Zabel Award 2020)

"She is lightning 'the sea shines purple in.' With a seed bomb of words, she takes on the system... without once turning her back on lyrical splendor."—C.D. Wright, "The Book That Brenda Wrote" [from The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All]

"Thematically significant here, time dominates, as does the looming, viscerally rendered, and gorgeously obdurate natural world, both stretching out"—Library Journal, on Extra Hidden Life, among the Days

"Hillman's work will find a ready audience in poets of her own generation, as well as those younger poets following in her footsteps, in whose hands the category of 'ecopoetry' has exploded, sporelike, into countless unnamed species."—Publishers Weekly, on Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, Starred review

Editorial Reviews

"Hillman's latest collection gathers meditations on time, nature, contemporary life, social justice, and 'the ragged white moth of history' in one gorgeous stampede. These are all big poems, fully observed and richly packed with Hillman's customary linguistic brio and visceral toughness."—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Best Books of 2022

"This is a major book for our time, never turning away from erosion and the passage of time, the loss of ecosystems, and the aging of [the poet's] own body."—Susan McCabe, Colorado Review

"There's no summarizing Brenda Hillman's poetry...[she] speaks like an amplified inner life, an intimate friend, a conscience."—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR Staff picks "Books We Love"

"Her verses—brimming with unconventional formats and punctuation—traverse time and space."—Alta Journal

"[Hillman's] most recent books are rooted in broad social and ecological interests: 'passion' is a better term. She has invented a kind of dialogue with the earth; she writes with an intimacy and directness few equal and a magnificence of conception almost no one aspires to."—Citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Morton Dauwen Zabel Award 2020)

From the Publisher

★ 11/28/2022

Hillman (Extra Hidden Life, among the Days) wades provocatively into the strange times and stresses of contemporary human (and nonhuman) life. These poems turn their boundless attention on physical and interior landscapes to explore the relationship between experience and one’s capacity to reproduce thoughts and feelings in language. “(Dread can have/ a little fringe/ of whiteness but/ the predread has a roaming subcolor/ that can go toward joy plus a soft gray pleasure/ & the remaining context)” Hillman writes, interrogating the more subtle nuances and shades of stress. In the line, “mosses bunched , , , ,,, , , , ,,, , near the small oaks (did they fear stone?),” Hillman makes characteristically playful use of punctuation while speculating about the sentience of the natural world in a concrete manner. As in her previous collections, Hillman addresses her political activism, reflecting on the limits and powers of poetry in a world in which “capitalism will last longer than the bees.” Sprawling yet intimate, this generous collection showcases a singular poet at the height of her prowess. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

10/07/2022

"Yet experience had gathered itself, dark-eyed," observes the Los Angeles Times Book Award—winning Hillman (Practical Water), whose latest poetry collection gathers meditations on time, nature, contemporary life, social justice, and "the ragged white moth of history" in one gorgeous stampede. These are all big poems, fully observed and richly packed with Hillman's customary linguistic brio. The opening section takes us through landscapes marked by owl calls and cellphones, where "even outdoors there's a stress/ you can't get out of"; one poem notes, "there was a feeling/ right before/ the feeling," a sentiment echoed in the title of a later poem that captures our desire to snag the ineffable—in poetry and in life. The fine poem "People's Emotions in One City Block" shifts wittily and insightfully through the lives of pedestrians in an urban park, while elsewhere Hillman assesses a time when "laws were not working so we went outside// after the shootings" and the anxiety behind the pointed question "How do you hope to survive?" Yet there's a visceral toughness here, a "going-on regardless"; and as Hillman muses, "sometimes I'm called an 'activist-poet,' maybe to make my aesthetically odd poetry seem more relevant or marketable," it is clear she's not here to lecture or bemoan but to share. VERDICT Occasionally these poems feel full to overflowing, but Hillman's majestic new work belongs in most poetry collections.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal