In the sonnet “My Father’s Dante,” Ernest Hilbert writes:
You were gone twenty years before I read
The book that draws me faster on to you …”
In a “grim winter mood“, Hilbert is launched into “the lessons I failed now to learn”, but the final 6 lines opens out into another space, his father’s voice speaking: “There is so much more to observe.” Observing isn’t about looking up and around, though. Observing requires something different: “we will descend, and see …”
The longing in all of this, the specific objects anchored to memory, the opening-up into somewhere else with a swift intake of fresh air at the end – are hallmarks of Hilbert’s beautiful poetry, poetry I’ve been reading for many years now.
Nostalgia can be a cliche: drench everything in golden light and assume the audience will swoon. In that form, it’s lazy. Nostalgia can be toxic too: ah, the good old days when everything was simpler and better. (For whom?) But in its proper form, nostalgia is a poignant mix of unbearable and sweet, a reminder that the word’s Greek roots, after all, are “homesickness” and “pain”. No “golden light of memory,” just a longing to get back home. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work is steeped in this kind of effective nostalgia (and it shows up in his first novel, written when he was in college, so it was built into his sensibility from an early age). Ernest Hilbert’s poetry is filled with the swift sharp pang of nostalgia, not just for his own past but for other times, for objects, faces, smells, all of which he hopes might have something to say to him now. But when he strums his guitar in “Sing We,” the chords “will not / Resolve to songs I long ago forgot.”
In poem after poem in Hilbert’s beautiful new collection Last One Out
Broken up into separate parts, Last One Out is a progression from Hilbert’s childhood to his own experiences as a new father. (Full disclosure: I know Ernie.) The opening poems are haunted – quite literally – by memories, starting with “Welcome to all the Pleasures” where his grandfather – “German / With shoulders of granite, / Of beer and blue skies, / Blast furnaces” – tosses four-year-old Hilbert, who can’t swim, into the river. The poem ends with the child
Hung between what glows above
And what pulls below.
If I had to boil down Hilbert’s essence as a poet, it is this sense of “hanging between” the glow above and unseen forces – the past, memories, mysteries – pulling him down. Sometimes he finds equilibrium, trembling there, but it’s always slightly unstable, there’s always a pull one way or the other. A jar of fireflies “flash silent broadsides at our porch,” close enough to touch and yet also as distant as far-away “constellations of cold light.” Is there nothing in the vast space between? In “Recessional,” Hilbert describes being a child, hanging out in an empty church while his musical director father sat at the organ organizing “Bach manuscripts”. The poem is filled with images of both vast height (“the beamed vault of the nave”) and the pull of gravity, the cold stones of the floor. Child Hilbert crawls underneath the pews: “Never before would I have been so low / To the floor and childlike / … It felt like a discovery.” The height makes the depth possible and vice versa.
His poems are filled with images of other worlds, lost worlds, ancient Rome, a series of Atlantises, the detritus of wars long-over covered in dust and rust. These places, things, contain messages – incomprehensible, garbled, or lost – to this very observant man. Staring at Durer’s engraving of “St. Jerome in his study”, Hilbert perceives the room as
a drowned royal grave filled with sparks
And traces of an imagined world.
Or “Center City” which starts: “A bank was here.” (Side note: Some of this quality in his work resonates so strongly with me because I’m from Rhode Island where people give directions via landmarks that haven’t been there for 40 years, i.e.: “Take a left where the karate studio used to be.” The karate studio closed shop in the 80s, but locals nod, like, “Okay, I know where that is.”) Hilbert is haunted by what used to be here, either 20 years ago or 1,500 years ago. Sometimes the past sits on top of the present, kind of like those digitized holographic images which show you what a landscape looks like pre- and post-hurricane, or how a New York block changed over time. Hilbert never just sees “Now.”
Hilbert’s honesty is not just refreshing, but revelatory. In an early poem, he writes, bluntly, from the Chelsea Hotel: “My heart is a meteorite. / I am its crater.” Much later, near the end of the volume, he describes sitting on the couch on Super Bowl Sunday: “A poet as sentimental as I, as foolish / And as easily made up of failures / Sometimes as stupidly happy.” My eyes spiked with tears at “stupidly happy.” Maybe his past beckons like an Atlantis. Maybe some precious things have been lost along the way. But there is always the moment, the moment flickering with awareness of all that came before, “beacons” of light flashing from far away.
I mentioned catharsis, the opening-up quality in Hilbert’s work. He’s trying to communicate something to us: it’s not a belljar, it’s not a self-referential system. He’s looking at objects, and he’s letting us into his world, his way of seeing. In “Glacier,” he describes climbing with two friends to look at a glacier. The journey is arduous for him and he’s irritated (“I start to hate the two rising about me“, his lungs “scald“), he tries to move faster but “Lady Gravity wants me at the bottom.”) Up until now, this is a fine poem, creating a mood – as well as a structure for that mood – using images evoking height, pain, distance. Hilbert doesn’t stop there, though, and this is why I think he is special. As he reaches the glacier, his perspective opens up as the view opens out, and he is astonished by the sight before him of the precipice and the caverns below. Something melts away from him, but – crucially – there’s still a lingering sense of threat in the language: “smouldering” “treacherous reaches” “receding storm“. Not quite “the hills are alive,” now is it? But a crucible has been passed through, a barrier has been breached, and a transformation has taken place. He is caught between two poles again, the reaches of sky, the pull of Lady Gravity. The world is full of peril and nothing lasts forever, not people, objects, buildings, empires. Even the glacier will eventually melt.
But – to quote Metallica – the memory remains.
You can read more of Hilbert’s work at Poetry Foundation, and learn more about his other collections of poetry here.
