White Dress

by Brenda Hillman

Fear, romance, war, dreams, music, the past, architecture, ghosts, illness, travel, and evolution are the themes for this collection of poems

Genres: Poetry

57 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Brenda Hillman (born March 27, 1951, in Tucson, Arizona) is an American poet and translator.

She is the author of ten collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, which was awarded the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

A professor of Creative Writing, she holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at Saint Mary's College of California, in Moraga, California.

Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2016, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Reviews

[amanda abel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here’s the thing. I want to love this collection. My first poetry teacher, Craig, loved it, and I still have such respect for him and all the other poets he introduced me to in that first class in Fall of 1999, but most of this book doesn’t land for me. It’s Hillman’s first full-length collection, and reading it again all these years later, I find that by and large the images and the metaphors and the descriptions still don’t work for me. In fact, I can go multiple pages between being made to feel something. Which is not to say that there aren’t some that do work. I do see potential in these pages, so I think I need to look at her later collections and give them a shot. I’d like to have a chance to reevaluate my opinion.

[pearl friedland · Rating 3 out of 5]

more like a 3.5 for me. i didn’t feel connected to these poems, but their skill and meticulous metaphor are there

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brenda Hillman’s first full-length collection of poetry, “White Dress” (published 1984) is a pleasure to read. The collection presents 35 poems in three parts. Most are about a page in length and all are written in free verse. Hillman’s poems are frequently enjambed. A few poems span two pages and the longest in the collection, “In the Provinces” is five pages in length, broken up into eleven sections. The poems are on the surface very accessible, with familiar scenes presented using powerful and sometimes startling images and metaphors. This is not to say that the poems are simple, however. There are often many layers of meaning buried in Hillman’s writing, some of which – as in “Aubade” or “Exile” – we can only guess at without knowing the context in which the poem was written. Nevertheless, even these poems resonate powerfully with the reader. In fact, not knowing all the details allows the reader to adopt the poem into the story of their own lives and find meaning therein.

There are a number of motifs and images which recur throughout “White Dress.” One is that of night, stars and the moon. Another is feelings of fear or even terror. Hillman also frequently invokes images of trees and the seasons in these poems. Finally, there are references to, and meditations on, the speakers’ relationship with a lover or partner in several of the poems. Another striking feature of Hillman’s poems in this collection is her personification of some of the objects listed above. In “Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire,” three pears take on different personalities. In “Coffee, 3 A.M.,” the “sheets evict” the speaker. In “Storm Clouds,” the clouds become princes and wives. Yet another example can be found in “In the Provinces,” where “the starved moon leans on her elbow again / She is thinking of something to say.”

There are two references to a white dress in this collection, although neither is the title of a poem. The first is found in the book’s third poem “Coffee, 3 A.M.” The final line of the poem reads: “How terror does become you, like a white dress.” The second reference is in the last poem of the collection, entitled “Elipsis”, which includes the lines:
“I think of “The White Girl,”
That painting by Whistler,
How she stands well dressed on a rug

With a bear’s head,
Her gown and his teeth the same color,”

I’d like to conclude this review by sharing a few of my favourite lines from “White Dress.” The first comes from the poem “Architecture.”
“That simple act had mastered you
As snow will master the houses.”

The second comes from the poem “Driving.”
“Embarassing pleasure – stars peering
Through the windshield at you
Like a gang of relatives.”

Finally, the brilliant opening line from the poem entitled “February.”
“We’re trapped inside the belly of a horse;”

I thoroughly enjoyed reading “White Dress,” and highly recommend it as an introduction to Brenda Hillman’s writing and an excellent collection of poetry in its own right.

[Andy Stallings · Rating 2 out of 5]

Looks as though I read this in July of 2007, which must be when I bought it. I liked it a good bit less, today, than I did then.

I was trying, today, to imagine the circumstance in which this book would have been received with great interest, seen as a harbinger of a long and interesting poetic career. I can't imagine it, though I work with people still working in this vein, but am instead grateful for the poetry that has been written before and after this that has rejected the modes at work here, which I am so bored with. Brenda's work included, of course.

Got really sick of the "you" in these poems. And with poems "about" things "seen" in such an obvious sense. Almost occasional.

But still, skilled, clearly.