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Open Books: Events
November 19, 2009 07:30 PM
BRENDA HILLMAN
"Why do you write like this / a man asked me / Because sir I am / a sorceress looking for my sources," so writes Brenda Hillman in Practical Water ($22.95 Wesleyan), her eighth collection of poetry, the third in a series focusing on elements. This tour de force finds Hillman moving (dare we say?) fluidly through mystical, visionary realms of poetry and at the same time involved with immediate, politically charged realms. While attending Congressional hearings on the Iraq war, she took notes in a trance state. At the ocean she finds, touching the surface, "a calm inside the prize, the gold halves // beyond the terms of argument & terrifying acts of intent." Hillman’s work is as passionately committed to public policy as it is to mystery and the imagination, a paradox she wholly occupies. Echoes of Emily Dickinson’s sense and delivery resonate here, with Hillman using spaces within a line the way Dickinson used dashes, as in, "an ocean has no summary in tears." Besides reading from her book, Brenda Hillman will give a presentation, with visual images, on "eco-poetics, earth-spirits, and activism," to be followed by a question-and-answer period. Come prepared to be entertained, educated, and engaged.
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