Bird of Winter

by Alice Hiller

Alice Hiller's debut performs an act of witness and restitution. Working with her childhood and adolescent medical notes, bird of winter creates a redemptive language to speak the darkness of being sexually abused by a family member. Through the excavated histories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, these poems additionally document the grooming that prepares a child for sexual abuse, and the vulnerability which remains afterwards. Calling up the landscapes and relationships which sustained her, as well as the injury she experienced, Hiller reflects the nature and impact of a crime to which millions around the world are subjected - and asks how we may find our ways towards healing.

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2021

Reviews

[Serge ♆ Neptune · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a precious book, a poetry collection we'll talk about for years to come. Alice writes about intense and dark themes but she does it with grace and poise. Not a single word is wasted or out of place, Alice's skill of managing trauma through language and transmuting it in this beautiful gem are so striking. This book will help so many to heal. A powerful enchantment.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Alice Hiller's debut collection and it is a highly personal one. She uses archaeology, specifically the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii, as a metaphor for excavating her own past from ashes.

Hiller was abused by a member of her family as a child. This collection explores that terrible experience sometimes and how it impacts the victim. It is, at points, not the easiest of reads but the way Hiller uses Herculaneum and Pompeii is so right. Part of me realises that explaining it in more detail is just going to spoil the impact of it. Part of me wanted to say 'clever' instead of 'right' but actually right feels more...correct. There is a 'rightness of things' that I think is stronger than cleverness. Cleverness feels cold. Rightness feels natural. But I realise this might just be my weird personal take on the world.

Hiller does interesting things with form too. She uses the page well topographically. Sometimes almost as word paintings, 'her door is missing' on p35 being a perfect example. That also uses other people's words. It's as much art as it is poetry.

There are also the 'erasures'. These are poems made by taking other people's texts, whether that is Latin texts such as Martial's epigrams or archaeological works and creating poems from them by erasing words and sentences. Sometimes you feel poets are trying too hard to do interesting things with layout and text. As if they lack faith in the words they are using to do the job on their own. Sometimes they get carried away with their own cleverness. But, in Hiller's case, these things work. They feel like the right (there's that word again) choice.

This is a book of right choices.

I can't recommend this highly enough and it is such a strong work for a debut collection.

"there will always be the city
beneath this city charted by no one
where columns of stone tears
cling to the ceilings"
from sea level, p59

[Pascale Petit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bird of Winter is astonishing in its precision and transformation, unspeakable pain frozen into snow crystals and petrified into precious gems. The poems are acts of compression and catharsis, of defiance and revelation. In such a slim book we are shown the terrors of humanity and how to survive them and sing. This is one of the most extraordinary debuts of the decade.

[Romalyn Ante · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alice Hiller gives us work that is emotionally authentic, searing, and salving at the same time. She paints the dark corners of trauma and child abuse with vivid and striking imagery, yet, the economy and beauty of her language never fail to amaze and jar me. This book will be loved and talked about in the UK poetry landscape for a long time.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

such a sharp, delicate, horrifying collection. I want to reread it. Alice reads through Pompeii, Herculaneum. And of her experience of childhood sexual abuse. It's not one to read lightly I feel this is claustrophobic but her brushstrokes are so careful.
I want to know more about her Concretes here they're possibly an unorthodox approach to the subject matter but I enjoy them.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up a copy of Alice Hiller's Bird of Winter from my local library, having heard nothing about it. The collection is hard-hitting and deeply personal, and I would highly recommend it.

[Simon Barraclough · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most compelling poetry collections I’ve read in a long while. Fragmentary, yet unified, erudite and burningly personal. Left my bones resonating at a new frequency.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I am the tower and the tower is my silence / I am the cold and the cold is all over”, writes Alice Hiller in her debut collection of poetry, bird of winter. This is a collection steeped in and moving through trauma, the lived reality of sexual abuse and its aftermath; conjuring a version of herself from childhood + teenage medical notes, the “alice hiller” of the poems mired in depression and “her bed in the white cloud”, full of the inherent promise of an Alice Hiller capable of writing back to the 1970s from the present, seeing herself “ris[ing] up light as a leaf”, “cold air [...] lifting her / out into the waiting sky”. Between the obscurity + bewilderment of her erasure poems, and her other visually arresting, formally playful work, Hiller never loses sight of the vivid world in which an escape from oppressive interiority is made possible, “dew on spider webs / gates shawled in mist / the startled hydrangeas”. In a conceptual limbo between the grand halls of memory and the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, Hiller finds her voice in a singular, lyrically gorgeous sweep of poems, conjuring an aching but beautiful vision of the past in all its complexity, the richness of loss palpable and stirring: “you sent me drawings from the hospital / until your body became the house / through which death walked / but did not close the door” — and, later, “I perched beside you on the cliff / watching the swan with smoke for a neck / lower our sun in its wake”.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this spare, elliptical and poignant collection, Alice Hiller explores childhood trauma via the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Using a mixture of erasure poetry, concrete poetry, and her own spare, free-verse style, Hiller looks at different facets of childhood sexual abuse, and captures the terrifying and shattering impact on a child. By using different lenses to confront a painful truth, Hiller brings us to the places that language struggles to capture, and creates a nuanced and evocative portrait of a young girl caught at the centre of an abuser's web. Her exploration of Pompeii and Herculaneum also looks at something too catastrophic for words, and by putting the two experiences within the same space, Hiller creates a rich lexicon for grief and destruction, and asks to look at them anew. This collection is deeply considered, uncompromising and full of compassion. I recommend it.

[✰matthew✰ · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a stunning collection. the author uses history, and sometimes nature to talk about her traumatic childhood experiences.

the topic of pompeii is used as a reference point throughout this collection and poems are interwoven with historical details and real life experiences of the author.

the way form and the blank space of a page are used is unusual and interesting, i really liked it. especially the erasure poems. i also appreciated the notes that accompanied some poems.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars...
I honestly don't know what to make of this. I thought I knew what I was going to expect from the potentially triggering blurb, but... Wtf. 🤔😴