Donna Hilbert explores home, family, and life
One aspect of collected and selected poem editions is the insight they offer into how a poet grows and develops. I have a 1980 edition (20th printing, no less) of the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which is something of a personal treasure. On the bookshelf, it sits very close to The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot (Annotated; 2015), which I hauled back from England in my carry-on bag and developed new arm muscles in the process. Both works helped me see how the two poets developed over a lifetime of writing poetry.
Collections aren’t only for famous dead poets. Donna Hilbert has been publishing poetry collections for 35 years. A consistent theme in her work has been an exploration of home and family and navigating life within that context. In 2018, she published Gravity: New & Selected Poems, a selection of poems from past collections as well as a number of new poems. This winter, her publisher has issued a second edition of Gravity.
The collection pulls poems from four of Hilbert’s published works and adds a significant new poems section. We can see what she was writing in 2000, and what she was concerned about almost two decades later. All of the poems are consistently good.
Her subjects vary, but they center on those themes of home, family, and relationships. She writes a poem to her first love. She watches her father nap and then considers the last photograph she has of him wearing the same sweatsuit. She describes the domestic arts, red roses, and frying a chicken.
One section I found particularly moving was in the included new poems, subtitled “Objects Brought from My Mother’s House.” The objects (and poems for each) include an ashtray; a green pot which has served as a chamber pot, and spittoon and now holds pencils; a clay figure made for Mother’s Day; a pair of gloves; and the contents of her mother’s purse. When everything is collected and stowed in her car, this is what Hilbert discovers.
When I Open the Door
It scorches my face
like a slap: sweet odor
of Mother, trapped
in bags of jackets and hats,
in boxes of knick-knacks
and books, which sat
two days closed up in my car.
It sears my face
while I empty the car
with each parcel I mail
with each offering of books
each bag that I leave
for Goodwill: this perfume
of my mother disappearing.
Those of us who have buried a mother or father know what she is writing about.
Donna Hilbert
Hilbert previously published Enormous Blue Umbrella (2024), Threnody (2022), Gravity: New & Selected Poems (2018), The Green Season (2009), Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems (2004), and Transforming Matter (2000), among several others. She also published a collection of short stories, Women Who Make Money and the Men Who Love Them. Grief Becomes Me: A Love Story is a documentary about her life and work and the death of her husband. She lives in Long Beach, California, where she writes and teaches private workshops.
Home and family life is like gravity, and it’s an appropriate title for what can weigh us down as well us what provides our sense of place and rootedness. Gravity is a wonderfully fine collection, filled with wisdom and insight.
Related:
Poets and Poems: Donna Hilbert and Enormous Blue Umbrella
Poets and Poems: Donna Hilbert and Thrednody
Photo by Phillippe Put, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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Sandra Heska King says
“this perfume
of my mother disappearing.”
That line.
Donna J Hilbert says
Thank you so much! I am overwhelmed!
Jian says
The perfume of my mother disappearing
Wow