Practical Water is, like Brenda Hillman's previous two books, Cascadia and Pieces of Air in the Epic, both an elemental meditation and an ecopoetics; this time her subject is water: Taoist water, baptismal water, water from the muses' fountains, the practical waters of hydrology from which we draw our being-and the stilled water in a glass in a Senate chamber. Not since Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon has American poetry seen the likes of the hallucinatory wit and moral clarity that Hillman brings to Washington in her poems about Congressional Hearings on the Iraq War. Here also-because it is about many kinds of power-is a sequence of twinned lyrics for the moon, governess of tides and night vision, for visible and invisible faces. Violence and the common world, fact, and dream, science and magic, intuition, and perception are reconfigured as the poet explores matters of spirit in political life and earthly fate. If it is time to weep by the waters of Babylon, it is also time to touch water's living currents. No one is reimagining the possibilities of lyric poetry with more inventiveness; this is masterful work by one of our finest poets.
""How does one engage in antiwar and environmental activism while living a comfortable Bay Area life? How can one be an effective voice for change as a writer of experimental, oblique lyrics, often influenced by Gnosticism and other esoteric practices? Hillman meets these challenges with good humor and ingenuityI admire Hillman's determination to bring such unlikely influences together.""
Jeff Gundy
""If history is the public and collective, Hillman is historically engaged She is herself a 'resister.' Section titles-'Of International Waters,' 'Of Communal Authority,' 'Of the Months When you Work & the Months When you Can't,' and 'Of Local Creeks & Aquaducts'-identify her work as respectively internationalist, socially-committed, conscientious, and eco-poetic. She writes out of and to the soci
Fiona Sampson
"If history is the public and collective, Hillman is historically engaged She is herself a 'resister.'... Section titles¬-'Of International Waters,' 'Of Communal Authority,' 'Of the Months When you Work & the Months When you Can't,' and 'Of Local Creeks & Aquaducts'-identify her work as respectively internationalist, socially-committed, conscientious, and eco-poetic. She writes out of and to the s
