John James Audubon

The sharp dark thorn plummets like a dive-bomber,
No human moment of hesitation
In its rush through raw wind to join its goal.
Fish gather in quick, silver clouds, swell, veer.
They swim beneath this black-lit beacon,
Long-beaked chevron of darkness, lance of coal,
Swiftly struck ink dash, aiming down hard
Like a stealth fighter, so fast it suffers
No lapse of purpose. Poised and sinister,
Over a glistening sea, the Pirate Bird
Studies the breakers for new kills, hovers—
Earth its vast blank canvas and theater—
Supreme as midday sun, brutal as the sea,
And chosen, death’s fond emissary.

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.”