Winner of the The Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award (2006)In her newest poems, Brenda Hillman continues her exploration of nature and culture in ways that demonstrate her original place in experimental lyric traditions. Pieces of Air in the Epic is the second book of a tetrology that takes the elements—earth, air, water, fire—as its subject. As Hillman’s previous collection, Cascadia, explores “earth,” the present collection considers “air”—the many meanings of the word and the life-giving medium we breathe—to test a reality that is both political and personal. These formally inventive poems reexamine epic and lyric, braiding fact and dream, the social with the self. Hypnotic, spare verses use air on the page as a matrix for cultural healing; some are presided over by a feminine presence and address war in human history, while others are set in streets, parks and wilderness. There are meditations on auras, dust motes, and reading in libraries as acts of restorative memory. This work fuses animist consciousness with cautionary prophecy, and belongs to the mode of H.D. and Robert Duncan. Hillman's poetry continues to explore ways in which human life might be redeemed by imagination.

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Product Description: An elaborate collection of poems that culminate in a meditation on the possibility of a native and feminine language, (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In the title poem “Fortress”, the medieval walled castle is the stronghold in which the family dwells. There are stories here of people in the “fortresses” of the self, the city, or the natural world. All these poems have in common a lyrical approach to solitude (“the only protection / against death/ was to love solitude”) and an ironical vision for which love of beauty and the longing for the world are the cure. Hillman combines the imagistic with narrative; in her poems lyricism wars with irony; the solitary noticing consciousness is in control – because the observed world seems beautiful to the observer, great joy is possible despite the sense of difficulty or sorrow. The language here is rich and elegant. Truth is relentlessly addressed. (view table of contents)

Fear, romance, war, dreams, music, the past, architecture, ghosts, illness, travel, and evolution are the themes for this collection of poems