Woodland Cemetery, Philadelphia

The first visit I failed to find it, where
Commodores and captains lie in brazen
White vaults over humble Quaker enclaves.
Five deer flashed in sun-streaked shade and paused there,
Pure as stone in faint sun flicker, frozen,
And then they dashed and leapt over worn graves.
My formal heart, numb and flawed, was struck raw
To learn life dies in art, yet such stillness
Can stir so fast it seems to disappear:
Time shown in a surgeon’s blood-shadowed saw
Or summer’s swift rowers slipping from us,
While upriver, to others, they grow nearer.
Wind rearranges sunlight through the pines,
Sowing and destroying endless designs.

Publisher’s Announcement

Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert’s first book, Sixty Sonnets, contain memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate lives—failed novelists, forgotten literary critics, cruel husbands, puzzled historians, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, high school dropouts, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems (“My love, we know how species run extinct”), satires (“The way of the human variety, / Not even happy just being happy”), elegies (The cold edge of the world closed on you, kissed / You shut”), and songs of sorrow (“Seasons start slowly. They end that way too”). The original rhyme scheme devised for this sequence—ABCABCDEFDEFGG—allows the author to dust off of the Italian “little song” and Americanize the Elizabethan love poem for the twenty-first century. Speaking at times in propria persona (“We’ll head out, you and me, have a pint”), at times in the voice of both male and female characters (“I’m sorry I left you that day at MoMA”), at times across historical gulfs (“Caesar and Charlemagne, Curie, Capone”), Sixty Sonnets marshals both trivia and tragedy to tell stories of modern America, at last achieving a hard-won sense of careful optimism, observing “the last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.”