One more day to pre-order Ernest Hilbert’s new chapbook Aim Your Arrows at the Sun at a reduced rate!
by Ernie on 03/11/09 at 11:34 am
Pre-order Aim Your Arrows at the Sun for $12 ($20 after official publication tomorrow). Write directly to editor Daniel Lin at daniel@loveamongtheruins.com. For more information about the press and the party, please visit their website.
You are invited to the launch party (free beer and wine!) at Melville House Books in DUMBO Brooklyn, Wednesday November 4th at 7PM.
Ernest Hilbert will read from Aim Your Arrows at the Sun, his new hand-sewn, fine press chapbook from LATR Editions, which will be issued in an edition of 250 hand-sewn copies. Heather Green will also be there to read from her new book, No Omen (LATR).
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009, 7PM
Melville House Books
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
phone 718.722.9204
info@mhpbooks.com
Complimentary beer and wine.
Copies available at $12 for pre-order ($20 after publication)
Adam Kirsch’s Foreword to Aim Your Arrows at the Sun:
To be haunted, for an American poet today, is a rare and enviable condition. Not by personal demons—everyone has those, and when poets write about them they are really haunting themselves. To be genuinely haunted, as Ernest Hilbert is in these outward- and backward-looking poems, one must be conscious of the past, and of the chastening contrast between the past and the present; in other words, one must have a sense of history. And history is the “bruising storm” that “matures” on the horizon of Hilbert’s poems, as he writes in “Selv’oscura,” while the poet remains “swaddled” in the untrustworthy comfort of the present.
When Hilbert is visited by the past, in these poems at least, it is by grand and violent phantoms: “I read on about the lives and deaths of kings,” he writes in a Lowellian phrase in “April Arsenal.” Like Robert Lowell, Hilbert is drawn to scenes of carnage, where the true face of humanity seems to reveal itself. A destroyed tank in the Sinai Desert has weathered into landscape, its “long-ago blow and loss” like an archeological reminder of the ways human beings, in the Middle East especially, keep returning to ancient patterns of violence: “proof that armies advanced this far / Before in the baffling waste,” as Hilbert puts it in “On Passing the Remains of a T-62 in the Sinai.” The scene rhymes with the “Normandy beachhead, beneath clouds of naval gunfire,” in “Surrender of Breda,” a poem titled after Velasquez’s masterpiece of a forgotten war.
But if the poet’s present seems much more peaceful than the poems’ past, Hilbert is not at all sure that is an advantage. The most savage poems in Aim Your Arrows at the Sun use the past’s grandeur to reproach the pettiness of our world. In the Juvenalian “Bread and Circuses,” Hilbert sees our TV shows and fast food as the equivalent of the largesse with which Rome’s rulers stupefied her people. “Gettysburg,” continuing the tradition of Civil War poems by Allen Tate and Lowell, contrasts the Union and Confederate dead with their parody reenactors: “The soldiers who fought that day / Weren’t plump. They didn’t wear wristwatches,” Hilbert observes.
After such humiliating contrasts, Hilbert and the reader can only take comfort in the truth stated in “Dining with Representatives of the Vatican Museum”—that it is art, including the art of poetry, that survives the past and incarnates it. Poems like the ones in Aim Your Arrows at the Sun are the “small remains of each man and each age” that remind us of what is past and passing, and that will represent us in times to come.
