bout three years ago, when Brenda Hillman’s Loose Sugar was published, I was immediately taken by its sheer beauty, its structural and linguistic inventiveness, and its willingness to take on the worn ground of autobiography and render it fresh. And the love poems!--this book seemed important. Within my admittedly small literary circle, however, nobody was talking about it. I finally asked an acquaintance, a poet, what he thought of the new book. His reply surprised me: “I liked Hillman when she made sense.”

Since then, I’ve heard similar criticisms, some of them sincere, others I can only characterize as catty--at a well-known writer’s workshop this past summer, I overheard a conversation between several young poets accusing Hillman of  “selling out” to a poetic climate that encourages and rewards “difficulty,” and that “being experimental” was a shrewd career move, engineered to generate talk, to in fact make this book more important than it is. In any case, save a few early reviews, public discourse on the poetry of Brenda Hillman is virtually non-existent. While I don’t aim to change that with this short essay, I do aim to encourage those who haven’t read Hillman or, those who were turned off by her “conversion” to the experimental camp to give her work, particularly Loose Sugar, another look.

A poem by Raymond Carver, For Semra, With Martial Vigor, makes my assertion this way: “All poems are love poems...” (20). Brenda Hillman, among other things, is a love poet. How she transmutes the raw stuff of language into the fragile, virtuosic, imperfect structures that are her poems is my concern in this essay. In an early poem in Loose Sugar, Orion’s Belt, she asks “how love bothers at all...” (35). For Hillman, the how is bound up in the doing, the building of a poem-- the “truth,” a shaky concept to postmodernists, is in her poems, love. For all her linguistic lubricity, technical and structural virtuosity, and concern for form/disorder, I think that Hillman and the speaker in her poems would certainly agree with Carver’s narrator.

Throughout Loose Sugar, we encounter a speaker obsessed with love and language, yearning and wholeness, and the sense of the incomplete. These elements are sometimes fused, sometimes left fragmented. In the poem Remembering Form, Hillman the poet becomes Hillman the narrator, a common substitution in these poems. In the world of contemporary poetry, this should not seem unusual. For Hillman, though, the identification of poet with speaker is a cautious one, and the link more tenuous than one finds in the poems of say, Molly Peacock or Sharon Olds. The most obvious distancing technique employed is the almost constant use of the the second person pronoun as a collective net which encompasses poet, speaker, and reader. She describes herself (and the reader as well) like this: “even if your preferred mode is fragment, you need syntax / to love.” (2-3). Hillman, whose preferred mode is fragment, is one of the only contemporary poets working within the “post-modern” idiom who is able to seamlessly and shamelessly write poems in which the speaker and the poet exist as an integrated but not-quite whole--two halves combined to make the one who isn’t quite Brenda Hillman and isn’t quite a narrative foil, but an authentic synthesis, a still incomplete mind searching in a world of words that never seem to mean what they say. This is not a poetry of the confessional autobiography mode, even though we are plainly aware that much of the time Hillman is writing about herself. The reader is not, however, emotionally manipulated or asked to listen uncomfortably to a litany of trendy neuroses, or problems so individual, so personal as to preclude entanglement with the objective world. Instead, the subjectivity of the poet is generous, abundant with “real things.” She offers up in these poems the linguistic equivalent of the material of her emotional and intellectual life, and as if in a scrabble game, mixes the tiles, distorts the syntax in a way that produces not confusion, but authentic identification as opposed to sympathy. Our identification with the poem comes not from direct prodding on the poet’s part, but because we too must make sense of Hillman’s material, discovering in the process that it is also our material. Instead of packaging her life for us, she gives us the pieces in a telegraphic fashion that presumably emulates the same way in which thoughts and images first emerge from or emboss themselves on the poet’s mind. This is the old “first thought, best thought” idea with a twist--it only seems as if we are encountering first thoughts on the page. This is poetry in which we are submerged almost unwillingly, so that each reader becomes a Hillman-surrogate in the best of her poems.

In Visitor Fragments, a serious of untitled lines dropped in the middle of the book--as an interruption, a frequent tool--it is difficult for the reader, especially the reader who is a poet himself, to not get sucked into Hillman’s world, and for the course of several sparse pages, become in part, both the reader and the subject of the poem. Hillman covers familiar territory here. For a poet who prefers fragments and loose ends, this is a fine place to begin examining the poems themselves, or in this case, the almost-poems that comprise this section. Hillman is addressing this, a love poem of sorts, to the unnamable muse, in Loose Sugar’s parlance (and also that of her previous book, Bright Existence), “the visitor.” We are dealing at once with a poem of loss and recovery, an ars poetica, and a poem of yearning--for love of and through creation. Two of Hillman’s favorite symbols of knowledge and learning, of creation and visitation, are the owl and the cave. We encounter them again and again in her poems, often blended together, the significance of either always a bit shady, but clear enough that we may discern the outline. The narrator herself is never sure about exactly what they mean, which brings us to another useful caveat to be mindful of when reading Hillman’s poetry: this is not a body of work about drawing conclusions or finding answers. It is a work about progress, discovery, mystery, finding out you were wrong and starting over. There is never resolution in a Hillman poem, only continuation--the fragments, the dashes that reach to the before and the after, the trailing ellipses, these are all signposts that we’ve entered a world in which answers don’t exist--only process. The tentativeness recalls a frazzled Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop’s poems, though, despite their frequent glimpses of uncertainty, always seems by poem’s end, sure and authoritative. Hillman makes no such effort, and in fact emphasizes the disconnection, the confusion.

The first fragment, a short prose paragraph, describes the form of the visitor. In this incarnation, she is described as a feminine figure “...with the eyes of an owl, or a walnut half who could come and go inside a circle and withdraw;” (Loose Sugar, 36). Hillman’s facility for striking imagery immediately sets us up for the recurring motif of roundness that follows, a roundness that seems at home in a poem about completion, or failure to achieve completion. The second fragment elaborates on her form, most strikingly describing her “...as a kind of ( )” (37). The parentheses, no mere typographical gimmick, effectively echo the shape of the visitor, the circle, the cave. The implications are manifold as well--each parenthesis is a walnut half, a piece of the incomplete circle. The parentheses also play their traditional role as “markers of the less significant.” This feminine force, this muse, is an extension of the poet, and the thing that simultaneously explains and obfuscates the poet’s message. Language itself is a barrier, something fit to exist within parentheses, and the thing loved, the thing with almost god-like power over the poet. Later, we learn that the visitor has no more control than the poet, that perhaps they control each other. The comings and goings of poetic inspiration are perplexing at best, chaotic at worst. The narrator is looking for someone “...who would be stately under these conditions, / who would not dance.” (38). The someone of course, describes again the visitor and the narrator herself. Here we begin to see perhaps the even greater significance of the parentheses--each parenthesis is one piece of the bifurcated self, the incomplete poet, one the narrator, the other the visitor. The joke of course is that when placed side by side, they don’t achieve completion--instead, they actually serve to subdue, to downplay what is placed between them. This section ends with a simple but poignant plea--lover to beloved, one half to the other half, conscious to subconscious:

    
      my
      visitor come back
      
        into
      the cave
      I can’t stand
      
        the days when you are gone (42)

This notion of constant creation without completion is the strong undercurrent that runs through all these poems, simultaneously comforting and heartbreaking.

While the “poems” of Visitor Fragments typify Hillman’s “poetry of process,” the same concepts abound throughout the book. Understanding much of the other work in Loose Sugar becomes easier to the reader who has unlocked this particular door. For example, the half-circled parenthesis returns later, this time disguised not as a cave or a walnut half, or even a set of teeth by the bedside, but in the “Loose Sugar” sequence as “the curve in a 5.” (Two Rivers, 4), an obsession she explains in Red Fingernails: “making numbers, I developed a love of the partially hollow;” (9).

While many of the poems in Loose Sugar can and often do stand alone, a more sensitive and comprehensive reading depends on reading each poem within the greater context of the whole (a specious word, given the topic). The very concept of the whole, with a beginning and an end, although longed for, is refuted throughout the book. “I disagreed with the concept of “line”--”(National Development, 16) the narrator tells us, and then, in The Unbeginning,

      --or,
      maybe you could just
        
      give
      up on beginnings.
      After all,
      
      This
      notion that things start
      
      and
      end somewhere 
      
      has
      caused you so much trouble! (1-5).

Again, Hillman iterates her persistent un-theme, that of the poet/narrator/reader lacking mooring. We really are, she tells us, mucking around on unsure ground. The barrier to understanding is the gap in the circle that doesn’t exist. The intimacy of such a poem partially depends upon the second person pronoun. The “you” of a Hillman poem is anyone who cares to accept Hillman’s invitation to ponder the incomplete mysteries of life, love, and language.

While I’ve discussed the linguistic slipperiness and lack of grounding in much of Hillman’s poetry, there is a respite from the maelstrom. One variety of the postmodern problem, particularly the particular brand of postmodernism practiced by writers suspended between two cultures, is most often displaced by love, or human interdependence. This is one of the underlying themes of the novels of Nabokov, the plays of Thomas Beckett, and countless others. When the artist loses a measure of his culture, his artistic fruits are almost always attempts at the reconstruction of a reality, a grappling with the “real world”; attempts which typically lead not to a conclusion, but to an incomplete circular confusion, a darkness only occasionally punctuated by points of light. The answer to this constant uncertainty and darkness lies in what must by now seem obvious. Hillman’s poems, while never quite arriving anywhere, come the closest to reaching conclusions, or at the least, a temporary stay from their confusion when they openly and unabashedly embrace love. In these instances, the poet/narrator simply stops trying so hard, and in moments such as these, we recognize that the most comfortable places of rest in an uncomfortable world, and likewise, the most comfortable moments in a difficult text, are those that dwell in love, which “...comes from nothing but it comes.” (Two Brothers, 12). Even the poems about erotic love, arguably the most accessible work in the book, are replete with Hillman’s constant circular imagery, as well as the familiar cave and owl. In Orion’s Belt, the containers are stars, points on the body, and buttons on jeans. In The Spark, sex is the roundness of “their summer stars inside of you,” (62) stars that are “doomed to circle / like the three mysteries at the start of time:” (Orion’s Belt, 31-32. Italics mine.) Again, the circle asserts itself as Male Nipples, a few pages later. It’s as if these poems exist as points of refuge amidst a larger landscape of the difficult. It is here, in the erotic poems, in which Hillman tells us that the most important things, perhaps are not The Mysteries, a poem that belies its title when it says, “what gives you immortal life turns out to be / the breath of another person...” When love is right, when the mystery stills (in Hillman’s world, only momentarily) “everything else mostly fades / in the folds of heaven.” (Orion’s Belt, 44-45).

While Hillman’s poems reveal a preoccupation with the unfinished and the impossible, they also offer refuge from the intellectual storm. When we stop looking for what’s not there, the hazy mirror reflected on these pages becomes a bit less shady, without ever delving into facile imagery or crystal clarity. We don’t find the end because it’s not there. Instead the reader will discover the poem as an invitation to create, and the struggle inherent in the act of creation--here manifested as love and loss of the muse, “the seeking and the ache,” an ache only assuaged for those few brief moments when physical love takes over.

If Jack Gilbert’s poetic scope of vision seems less ambitious than Hillman’s, it is also less scattered. Gilbert’s poems are more grounded, more concrete, and more accessible. While Hillman sees language as the essential wall onto which the mysteries of love and life are etched, the immutable substance that can only be manipulated with great difficulty and uncertainty, Jack Gilbert recognizes the difficulty of words while never becoming enslaved to them. His poems address the problems of the poet encountering the often defamiliarized territory of the English language, without ever becoming lost in the details. "How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / and frightening that it does not quite...” he writes in The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart, then proceeds to make language mean something, even if it is only “...amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.” (25), all of which, in Gilbert’s “new language” are synonyms for love--like Hillman, it comes down to love. Where Hillman, though, must come back to love for grounding, Gilbert never leaves it. The human/human relationship, and in later poems, the human/God relationship are the most important themes of this poetry, themes that have, at their basis, love, which “...lays hold of everything we know.” (The Great Fires, 7).

Gilbert is a love poet, but his love takes many forms--erotic love, divine love, love of discovery and love in the midst of sorrow or loss. Like Hillman, and perhaps more obviously, but no less skillfully, Gilbert’s main material is his own life, a resource he manages to plunder without becoming self-indulgent or manipulative. The death of his wife, Michiko, is a constant subject for Jack Gilbert, and one in which the most tender moments emerge from unlikely situations as in Alone. Michiko, returned as a Dalmatian--a strange and disturbing reincarnation--“...cares nothing about / the mystery...” (15-16). Gilbert the poet is content to accept the existence of the mysteries of love and loss. It is not necessary to root around in sorrow; instead, following a tradition that smacks of Eastern Orthodox Mysticism, he finds the love, the holy, the divine in everything. The most ordinary or absurd moments are transformed into nodes on the greater body of the most holy, the grand body of love. Language, then, is merely Gilbert’s slave, one which he has near-total control over, even when it seems to perplex him. A simple move like the one in In Umbria, in which the action described is neither attributed to the speaker or the observed but is left ambiguous: “At the last instant could not resist darting a look / down at her new breasts.” (9-10) lends great power to a simple poem that essentially asks us to define beauty. These are the places in which ambiguity is an important poetic tool, where big ideas like beauty and love start to blur, to bleed into each other, so the language itself becomes unclear. And while this particular poem is not one of direct loss, like the Michiko poems, it too chronicles an implied loss, the loss of innocence, for both the girl described and the speaker, who imagines a simpler time as a younger man. These poems are bittersweet, and much fuller than their initial facility belies.

When the confusion returns, it returns again in the form of linguistic uncertainty. Like Hillman, Gilbert yearns, but his yearning takes a backseat to the subject matter of life, a life for Gilbert that is, apparently, able to exist apart from the page. That is, Gilbert isn’t living a life to make poetry, he merely finds poetry in life--if confusion with language creeps in, it is most often a metaphor for not understanding an emotional aspect of a situation. This is in direct contrast to Brenda Hillman’s apparent confusion with the language itself. Hillman is the language-oriented poet who occasionally finds calm in the embrace of love. Gilbert is the love poet who finds and employs linguistic problems to stand in for emotional ones. In Finding Something, he writes, “I say moon is horses in the tempered dark / because horse is the closest I can get to it.” (1-2).The word substitution here is a shady play on the need to displace one’s grief, or have one’s grief co-exist with one’s great love and devotion. In this poem about his dying wife, words are surrogate emotions, emotions that become blurred and indistinct in the tension of the moment. “How strange and fine to get so near to it.” (15). Near to what? we ask. The perfect mode of expression, the intensity of emotion, sorrow mingled with devotion? For Gilbert, the words are the best way to show what he can only feel. A garbled representation, to be sure, but one which yearns to be expressed. Like Orpheus and Prospero, his favorite literary dopplegangers, Jack Gilbert wields considerable power, power tempered with the real. That is, although he possesses a great sense of magic, he prefers to produce poetry of an austere surface, that only once we get beneath it, can we see the mystical significance that permeates it. As the title of one of his poems says, Gilbert is Prospero Without His Magic--or at least he seems that way. He is Dante dancing and he “...dances his grief wonderfully.” (Dante Dancing, 33).

The poems of both Hillman and Gilbert are, in different degrees, silvery drops of mercury--slippery, mutable, and most of all, reflective of ourselves--full of the inexplicable mysteries of love and language. While both poets attack the problem of love with fundamentally different attitudes, and employ different tools, they both ultimately succeed. The last poem in The Great Fires, Almost Happy, ends with the line “my home’s on a gone-away train. That train.” Like the train, the motion of Gilbert’s words continues long after we close the book. Hillman leaves us with this, perhaps the closest we can get to a shared theme in these two poets’ work: “When you are loved, you are golden--” (The Spark, 101). The rest of the time, we must be content with being almost happy.

Anthony Robinson teaches at the University of Oregon and is currently between graduate programs. His poetry is featured in the Poet's section. . He can be reached at antrobin@clipper.net

© Anthony Robinson