Sixty Sonnets
Ernest Hilbert’s sure-footed poems have the breathless urgency of a man telling others the way out of a burning building. Unafraid to startle, often winning out over recalcitrant material, they score astonishing successes. A bold explorer with few rivals, Hilbert enlarges the territory of traditional form.Sixty Sonnetsmay be the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America. – X.J. Kennedy, author ofLords of Misruleand editor ofLiterature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and DramaHilbert has an appetite for life equal to his taste in literature: a rare combination in an age of dissociated sensibility. In these sonnets, whose dark harmonies and omnivorous intellect remind the reader of Robert Lowell’s, Hilbert is alternately fugitive and connoisseur, hard drinker and high thinker. But he is always a true poet, proud to belong to the company of those who still feel “The last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.” – Adam Kirsch, author ofThe Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American PoetsJust as the work of the modernists showed that the best free verse usually has something masterfully formal about it, Hilbert’s fine collection might serve to remind us that the best formal poetry has about it a marvelous colloquial freshness and inventiveness, and the ring of an actual human voice. It is a touching and intelligent book. – Franz Wright, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry