Still House in the Desert: An Eco-Contemplation

Meditations on time, space, and objects in houses, as well as lives of children, mothers, and non-human creatures in domestic spaces

Each of Brenda Hillman's books has been transformative for her readers, and her twelfth collection is no exception. Building on previous volumes about seasons, days and minutes, Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-twentieth century. Here, magical poems explore rooms as opportunities for dream, and domestic objects as the dream-shapes where culture and imagination inform each other. In that way, the poet celebrates the layered lives of children and adults, including, strikingly, the life of her mother, a native of Brazil whose presence intimately links the processes of inner vision and daily tasks. Like Hillman's other pioneering work, these poems are personal and collective; they braid the spiritual, the scientific, the political, and the visionary. Short spare lyrics are placed beside longer pieces; small photos add to the visual structures of the pages. One long prose poem explores the child's neurological anxiety and the awakening of mid-century environmental consciousness, while another is a meditation on women's domestic work with textiles and the rhetoric of literary repetition. The closing sequence gives homage to unlikely intersections of humans with non-human lives, including dust mites, moths, and mycorrhizal roots. This remarkable collection will plunge readers into the mysteries of childhood and of childhood houses everywhere.

[Sample Poem]

The newspaper

Sunlight crosses the room bearing elastic dust motes.

Clouds graze steadily over the house.

Trucks cross the suburbs; they have been cleared for departure.

The mother scours the morning paper for facts
& uplifting stories, laughing--
almost a little snort--
maybe it's disbelief, maybe
it's puffs of air pushed out by her idea of God.

In this line, it's the next century,

in this line the mother & her little laugh are gone,

in this line two ravens eat a carcass in Maryland,

a hurried driver doesn't hit a fawn,

the vote is being tallied, the red seeps across the map

& drips from the thick finger of Florida into a sea
of pre-named storms, & the sea of blood rises,

the small barge carrying corpses of fact & dream,

their bones wrapped together in newsprint.

BRENDA HILLMAN was born in Tucson, Arizona, and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books and is the author of twelve full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022), Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), winner of the Northern California Book Award.