Thomas Eakins

Nimble rowers, their art ancient as war,
Raise their oars and ride gently on dented gold
As sun shocks the river to ribboned fire.
They haul hard and halt. Nothing prepares for
Their clear and precise aim. They raise and fold
Their blades under, pull, draw, rest, and respire.
Simple flexed machines of doused oar, bright fleck,
Trained across cold surfaces brisk as steel,
Delicate insect thrash, more than just life,
More than we allow ourselves to expect;
Polished slender shell of lacquered teal
Thrust through late noon light, fine as a knife.
Muscled rowers glide on their mirrored sky,
Winners, a day’s champions, built to die.

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.”