Book description
Practical Water is, like Brenda Hillman's previous two books, Cascadia
and Pieces of Air in the Epic, both an elemental meditation and an
ecopoetics; this time her subject is water: Taoist water, baptismal
water, water from the muses' fountains, the practical waters of
hydrology from which we draw our being--and the stilled water in a glass
in a Senate chamber. Not since Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the
Pentagon has American poetry seen the likes of the hallucinatory wit and
moral clarity that Hillman brings to Washington in her poems about
Congressional Hearings on the Iraq War. Here also--because it is about
many kinds of power--is a sequence of twinned lyrics for the moon,
governess of tides and night vision, for visible and invisible faces.
Violence and the common world, fact and dream, science and magic,
intuition and perception are reconfigured as the poet explores matters
of spirit in political life and earthly fate. If it is time to weep by
the waters of Babylon, it is also time to touch water's living currents.
No one is reimagining the possibilities of lyric poetry with more
inventiveness; this is masterful work by one of our finest poets.
"Hillman's Practical Water is moving and exciting."--Janet
McCann, Magill's Literary Annual BRENDA HILLMAN is the author of seven
collections of poetry and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, the editor of The
Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). She is
the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary's College, and
works with CodePink, a social justice organization against war. Hillman
won the William Carlos Williams Award for Pieces of Air in the Epic.
