For Christian

Kernel of light sheltered in earth’s dark loam,
You were born as the sun skimmed our summer,
And will rise up in time to greet the sky.
You’ll claim the world, its noon and night, for home,
And though age pulls horizons like thunder,
Its cold-shadowed rain remains far away.
Who can guess what strange futures you will know,
What roads you will cruise, what odd styles you’ll wear;
But the ranges you scale will become yours,
And we’ll be slowly left behind, as by a road
When a car speeds off, headed for somewhere
We cannot even imagine as ours.
For now, we know: you’ll be tall and quite smart,
Filled with lightning, and summers, from the start.

Publisher’s Announcement

Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert’s first book, Sixty Sonnets, contain memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate lives—failed novelists, forgotten literary critics, cruel husbands, puzzled historians, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, high school dropouts, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems (“My love, we know how species run extinct”), satires (“The way of the human variety, / Not even happy just being happy”), elegies (The cold edge of the world closed on you, kissed / You shut”), and songs of sorrow (“Seasons start slowly. They end that way too”). The original rhyme scheme devised for this sequence—ABCABCDEFDEFGG—allows the author to dust off of the Italian “little song” and Americanize the Elizabethan love poem for the twenty-first century. Speaking at times in propria persona (“We’ll head out, you and me, have a pint”), at times in the voice of both male and female characters (“I’m sorry I left you that day at MoMA”), at times across historical gulfs (“Caesar and Charlemagne, Curie, Capone”), Sixty Sonnets marshals both trivia and tragedy to tell stories of modern America, at last achieving a hard-won sense of careful optimism, observing “the last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.”