Cascadia
Brenda Hillman
Wesleyan University Press, $12.95
A connection could be made between Cascadia and C.D. Wright's
Deepstep Come Shining—both books, by two of the most interesting
poets of their generation, are road trips in verse, exploring regional
landscapes with love and reverence as well as with grave concern,
light mocking, and real critique. Like Deepstep, Cascadia
(the title comes from the name given to the prehistoric sea that existed
where Berkeley is now) is an invigorating read, challenging and welcoming
at once as it "mines" the state of California, where the
poet lives and teaches, from ancient geological history to the present
day.
Hillman is a poet with a wide-ranging sensibility, and that is one
of this book's pleasures: the poems, although thematically focused,
vary in form and tone from one to the next. But all are a mix of lyrical
fragment and poignant narrative; all bring together scientific, geographic,
vernacular and idiomatic language; all reflect a genuine concern about
the land. This is environmental poetry without dogma, didactics or
depression, and all the more powerful for it. In the second poem in
the book, "El Niño Orgonon," Hillman considers the
ocean:
its waves warm, its
sentences swell, until life, one of
the yeses between swirls, roundly, in
the form of beach parties with
center-colored balloons full of unused gases
from nearby stars that are suddenly
short of heat, moves to dreamishness
Many of the poems have this slightly dreamy quality, but they are
also very much poems of the contemporary world; "Telluric Poptart,"
Hillman writes, or, in the poem "THE RISE OF THE NAPA HILLS,"
"The sea has receded a little. Mild layers stack up / without
panic, like email." The reader will notice that there is, amid
the humor, a sense of erosion-words beginning with the prefix UN abound,
as in the poem "NEVER MINDSHAFT," in which she uses the
words "undry," "unmade," and "under."
The ground shifts beneath our feet, and sometimes falls away.
One of Hillman's talents is for formal innovation, and in Cascadia,
there are poems bordered by typographic symbols, poems in which some
words are printed in grayscale, and a poem in which the middle stanzas
are stacked vertically between the two horizontal ones. There is also
intricate rhyming and punning, as in these lines from "HALF THE
HALF-NOCTURNES:"
don't
call him
if you love him; put one
foot in front of the other,
like prose; the violins would play
so, the night would say
so; they're loading the notebooks
on
a cart that erases its road—
Some of the poems in this collection are more abstract than others,
but Hillman is adept at connecting with her readers even in difficult,
disjunctive poems—at one point she comments, "Weather taught
/ you to write funny. When it stops/being wrecked, we'll write normally,"
thus succinctly summing up why challenging times and a changed culture
demand challenging art and changed forms. Language is rooted to the
earth, as in the poem "A Geology," where wordplay from the
idea of an earthquake inspires "There are six major faults, there
are skipped/verbs, there are more little / thoughts in California,"
and later, "The number of faults in middle California / is staggering—that
is, we stagger / over them."
In the middle of Cascadia is "The Shirley Poem,"
based on letters written by a woman in California in the mid-1800s
at the height of the Gold Rush. The poems is interesting historically,
but it is also a rather bold use of such sources: while many poets
try to hide their source materials, or blend them seamlessly into
their own work, Hillman is open about what she has read, and simply
quotes the original letters, surrounding them with personal and contemporary
detail. Thus, at one point, we can assume that the poet is reading
Shirley's writing in a diner—"Oroville's (they pronounce
it) Corn-you-copia / Restaurant"—when she says,
Temporary crush on the East Branch
of the North Fork of the
Feather River but shouldn't it be
tines of a fork? Temporary crush
on the fry-cook because of his
Denver omelette. Permanent crush on
the dead.
Similarly crush-worthy, affirmative and deeply felt, Hillman's work
is that of a poet at peace with herself, using her heart and mind
to bear witness to the world's afflictions and respond with compassion…and
fine poems.
