Sixty Sonnets Selected as Book of the Year (Poetry) by ivebeenreadinglately.com

by Ernie on 21/12/09 at 12:44 pm

Ernest Hilbert’s Sixty Sonnets is exactly what its title suggests—and thus it’s a performance as much as a book of poems, showy and spectacular. From the brisk noir of “She Remembers How They Fled from the Liquor Store Robbery in New Mexico”—

You’d been shot three times, soaked with tar and sweat,
But you gunned the grimy frame toward night,
Lit a smoke and cringed at the oily guts
Leaking from your side. . .

—to the ironic call-and-response of “Fortunate Ones”—

You will inherit large sums of money
(But someone dear to you will have to die first).
You will travel far and see the wide world
(And load yourself with debt; these things aren’t free).
You can relax now. You’ve been through the worst
(But it consumed your youth, and now you’re old).

—to the elegiac fatalism of “White Noise”—

My songs are lost, as all will be at last,
Unremembered as a minor fiefdom,
Its peasants who tilled fields and died in wars.

—Hilbert takes the reader on a bravura run through seemingly every variation of tone and style that the sonnet can contain. It’s a craftsman’s book, a revival of form best summed up by the opening lines of “Song”:

A song for those who learn forgotten, slow
Skills, crafts submerged long past by massed commerce,
By hard, dark, oily machines, and the din
Of duplicates shipped by the millions, stowed
In cavernous depots to be dispersed
To each home, used once, and then binned.

Books of the year are those you know you’ll never bin; Sixty Sonnets belongs in their company.