Bøger af Ernest Hilbert

Ernest Hilbert's newest collection, All of You on the Good Earth, continues to explore the bizarre worlds of twenty-first century America first glimpsed in his debut, Sixty Sonnets, which X.J. Kennedy hailed as "maybe the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America" and "whose dark harmonies and omnivorous intellect remind the reader of Robert Lowell's," according to Adam Kirsch.

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."

Ernest Hilbert's newest poetry collection, Caligulan is heartrending and humorous, filled with love songs and requiems, meditations and memorials, as the poet imagines the ghost of the ruthless Roman emperor Caligula--who ruled over a pagan empire as prosperous as it was unaccountably cruel--looming over modern America, pronouncing his infamous commandment that his victims be killed slowly, "so that they know they are dying." Caligulan is at once terrifying and touching, a book haunted by the poet's many affections and angers, its poems animated by horror films and science fiction novels, heavy metal and opera, remote wilderness and ruined cities. Leaving behind the experimental sonnet forms he pioneered in his earlier books, Sixty Sonnets and All of You on the Good Earth, Hilbert delivers a chorus of poems that are conversational yet bizarre, stormy and surreal yet dexterously accomplished; brash, abrupt, and sometimes scathingly sarcastic. In four chapters of fourteen poems each, Hilbert leads the reader through modern America's triumphs and tragedies, elusive consolations and primeval horrors, all the while telling jokes, posing questions, and sounding warnings of things to come. Caligulan is a masterful new collection from a commanding and original poetic voice.