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Threnody
In Threnody, there is solace attending to quotidian rituals. In birdlife, landscape, seascape, joy and grief join hands. There is a measure of peace walking the beach, stirring the soup, pressing the shirt.
104 pages, Paperback
Published October 22, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 19, 2022
It’s easy to fall in love with Donna Hilbert’s poetry. She writes of everyday things: mothers, children and grands, husbands, birds, kitchen cupboards, and dandelions. What sets her poetry apart from others is her skill, her attention to detail and, especially, her attention to language.
While many of her poems are narrative, she isn’t afraid to slip in short, haiku-like lyrics. She isn’t afraid to slip in a rhyme when you least expect it. “Your death,/young one,/is the moon/blocking the sun,/but it does not pass,/is not undone.”
A “Hilbert poem” takes the reader somewhere special—the Palo Alto marshes, the beach, her kitchen while making risotto. She takes readers to the heart of the matter. Whether the narrator is peeved at a construction crew for leaving paper masks to blow in the wind, only to find that once the builder speaks to her, they are now friends; or when she discovers Liberace was born in West Allis, Wisconsin, and not the Bronx, readers will delight in the journey.
While the word “threnody” means lament, a dirge, a funeral song, readers won’t find her poems impossibly sad. Rather, they honor something human and fleeting; they touch us where we live, the lament of losses large and small. Even the birds suffer when the city arborist knocked heron hatchlings from trees. “The song in the tree is not the song in the sky./Not every voice in the choir rejoices.”
Hilbert finds solace in birds: sparrows, herons, crows. Their flight, their gathering, they take what gifts are given. Hilbert’s poems are gifts of their own: human, humane, and a pleasure.
Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017—2018 and author of A Theory of Lipstick, Main Street Rag Publishing Co, 2013 and Grief Bone, Five Oaks Press, 2017.
While many of her poems are narrative, she isn’t afraid to slip in short, haiku-like lyrics. She isn’t afraid to slip in a rhyme when you least expect it. “Your death,/young one,/is the moon/blocking the sun,/but it does not pass,/is not undone.”
A “Hilbert poem” takes the reader somewhere special—the Palo Alto marshes, the beach, her kitchen while making risotto. She takes readers to the heart of the matter. Whether the narrator is peeved at a construction crew for leaving paper masks to blow in the wind, only to find that once the builder speaks to her, they are now friends; or when she discovers Liberace was born in West Allis, Wisconsin, and not the Bronx, readers will delight in the journey.
While the word “threnody” means lament, a dirge, a funeral song, readers won’t find her poems impossibly sad. Rather, they honor something human and fleeting; they touch us where we live, the lament of losses large and small. Even the birds suffer when the city arborist knocked heron hatchlings from trees. “The song in the tree is not the song in the sky./Not every voice in the choir rejoices.”
Hilbert finds solace in birds: sparrows, herons, crows. Their flight, their gathering, they take what gifts are given. Hilbert’s poems are gifts of their own: human, humane, and a pleasure.
Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017—2018 and author of A Theory of Lipstick, Main Street Rag Publishing Co, 2013 and Grief Bone, Five Oaks Press, 2017.
December 13, 2021
Beautiful collection! Graceful, reflective, rejuvenating. Highly recommend!
May 20, 2023
How can this “layer cake of sorrow” comfort and fill me with such hope?
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews