Good poets hate to be put in boxes--and they write accordingly. Carol Snow's book of poems, "For", is confessional language poetry in a coffee table zen garden. It is a book of cool-headed searching that is not afraid to be domestic, married, and in love. Yet it is a sophisticated tease: it's frustrating to have a preposition floating on its own as "For" does on the cover of Snow's book. "For" what? we wonder. It's a question not formulated as one, and it keeps pointing towards the unknown. "For" is quiet at first hearing. The lines don't at first snap and lodge in one's memory, but they do look long and hard at the world, for something the eyes can latch on to. The language is tentative, edged with the cold stare of Experimental poetry, though it is a passionately lived and felt incarnation of the poet's spiritual quest.

"For" roams, looking for a place to attach the wordlessness that comes at life's difficult moments. In the title poem Snow confronts the death of her father, as thousands of poems do, but she does so with wonderful confusion and uncertainty: "To begin, even in the--even with the--disarray." The substitution of prepositions delicately expresses the difficulty of telling about a loved one's death. "In" suggests that the speaker is still living in the event. "With" brings it along as luggage. The speaker exists both in the remembered event and in the present moment. Later in the poem the father writes a note to remind himself of the day. "They [doctors] usually ask me this." The speaker and her sister respond to this with a mixture of shock and laughter. In watching this, the sisters are compared to a mask "turned outward toward you, for--something heartless the heart goes out to." This is a chillingly honest description of dying--and the watching of it. Linguistically the speaker and her sister are in the same scary and oddly comical position as the father facing and entering death.

"For" opens with a longing for a place where matters are reconciled. In "News Of" the speaker tries to reconcile "another massacre" with "the clear bright morning." Here, then, is another dangling preposition and a feeling of disconnection. There are too many things to attach "of" to and so many are not really known and felt. How do we attach our feelings and language to horrible events such as Columbine, especially when we are fine, and it is beautiful outside?

Many of the poems, such as "Mask Series," explore this distance between self and world with the image of a tether: "It ran away from me." Snow compares this experience of losing the tether to a childhood game of "naming a series of natural objects placed in a box" and to God: "God wanted to behold/God," but balances her ambitions with the humble and warm image of the speaker's husband feeling in the dark for the flannel nightdress over her thigh. Carol Snow's semiotic and theological musings are never allowed to wander too far from sensory experience. She feels in the dark for fragments of meaning--a stone found in a zen garden or a "...heart flung down like a stone." "For" is for someone and some thing the speaker cannot put a finger on. With a cool and steady gaze, Carol Snow's poems feel for a soft heart in hard matters.

Just as a prism breaks up light into a band of colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - and their infinite gradations, so do Emily Dickinson's poems become, as it were, a prism which captures the white light of reality, a reality which as it flows through the prism of her poem explodes into a multiplicity of meanings.

It is the rich suggestiveness of her poems, a suggestiveness which generates an incredible range of meanings, that prevents us from ever being able to say (to continue the metaphor) that a given poem is 'about red' or 'about blue,' because her poems, as US critic Robert Weisbuch has observed, are in fact about everything. This is what makes her so unique, and this is why she appeals to every kind of reader, and even to children.

The present book, which has been edited by Brenda Hillman, gives us accurate texts of the poems in a 150-page selection taken from the authoritative variorum edition of Thomas H. Johnson, the well-known Dickinson scholar who worked many years to establish the correct texts.

The book is beautifully printed in two-colors on excellent paper, and in a tiny format which is perfect for the pocket. It would in fact make a very nice gift. You'd be making a gift of poetry which is one of the wonders of the world.

... She's obviously one of the best, undiscovered writers in the world!! She first came to my attention through my fiance, who'd torn a poem from a 1997 edition of the "New Yorker" for keeping. After the events of September 11th, she was going through a pile of papers and came across that same poem. To her [and subsequently, myself] the poem resonated deeply with what we were going through. The name of that poem is "In the City of What Once Was" and it appears in this brilliant collection. Her work is alternately beautiful and mournful and it speaks eloquently of her experiences in a war-ravaged land [Ms. Ursa's work has been translated from her native Romanian]. She is at once lyrical, sad and evocative. I urge anyone interested in great poetry to BUY THIS BOOK. I'd also recommend that the major American publishers take a good look at her work!!!

What a talented poet brenda hillman is; full of brilliant phrases and keen perceptions, she's one of the few american poets who is culturally/politically observant and also authentically spiritual in her orientation. This is a potentially important and powerful combination of virtues, the poet all of us american readers and believers might hope for. Unfortunately, Hillman seems to be(I hope not) permanently infected with the experimentalist west coast poetics of fracture and obscurity; her poetry is increasingly marred by the coy mannerisms, the arid abstract occultations of the american left bank-- the result is that more and more of her poems are unreadable, and seem in fact made for that small audience of other "cool" hyper-intellectual, anti-representational poets; hillman is not the first poet to be misguided by a desperate desire to be thought of as ultra hip, but it's our loss too; the author of the resonant and lovely books bright existence fortress and death tractates has now written two unreadable collections, books which manage to be both over- and under-inflated at the same time. It's very frustrating. A cautionary tale: be careful who you go to cocktail parties with; you might get your head bent.

Cascadia is an ancient landform that preceded present-day California. Taken for the title of Brenda Hillman's collection of short lyrics, we are treated to a poetry that is profound, turbulent, and impressive. Glacial Erratics: The last ice age had been caused by a wobble./After it passed they made houses from stars;//Visitors would peer in/And see the tongs not slipping,//Roomsized pebbles having been moved far,//It's like this more/When we speak than when we write;//Loving thus we have been/Loved by ground,//The word being/A box with four of its corners hidden;//Everything else is round.

This is less a review and more a correction--Brenda Hillman teaches at Saint Mary's College of California, located in the town of Moraga, just over the hills from Berkeley. As of this writing (Jan.2002) she is in fact teaching at Iowa, along with Robert Hass, Cal Bedient, and Dean Young. She will be giving a reading at St. Mary's on April 25,2002, in the Soda Center, if anyone wishes to attend. She is one of the more wonderful people on the planet, and speaking from a student's point of view, a wonderful teacher. Speaking of originality, one of her favorite lines is, "A poor memory is a blessing." Make of it what you will.

Brenda Hillman is proving herself a master of that tenuous field between mainstream and Language poetry. While not her best work, Loose Sugar is a wild and consistent ride!

One thing about B. Hillman--her "open" poetry doesn't seem as calculated and easy as many other poets. It seems that she arrives upon the difficulty of her poems honestly--i.e., this is the only way I can articulate this, as opposed to: I could say this much easier, but then I wouldn't be hip. "Nipples" is a great poem. I love how Hillman can raise the everyday (Lean Cuisine) to the sublime. If you're interested in the more experimental bends of contemporary poetry, this would be a good volume--a subtext is still apparent beneath the fractured surface. This is more modern than post-modern: a good thing.

While this may start out for many as a scholarly work, it ended up for me to be a next-to-the-bedside book, something to touch base with in the day-to-day, which is where Brenda Hillman lives much of the time. How about picking it up randomly to read: (my apologies that I cannot make these poems appear as they do on the page, which is very important to Ms. Hillman's work -- the ruidmentary text editor used for these reviews doesn't allow me to enter the proper linebreaks).

Very Busy

--- Everyone talked about how much/ busier they were. Friends/ became the type/ that could work on a poem while driving . . .//

. . . Or/ maybe you could read less. The novels/ wouldn't mind. . . .

In many of her poems, there seem to be leftover words that, while they didn't fit in the poem, couldn't be discarded and are therefore left at the bottom of the page. After, for example, Symmetry Breaking, which starts with

Poking at the airplane meal. . . .

ends up, at the bottom of the page, with:

would you like the/ Chicken Kiev or the/ Lasagna

She is so much with the world, and not of it!

This book is one that now, three years after its publication, still seems brand-spanking new, and I think it might for a very long time. I know I'm always cheered up having the book nearby.