Still the Animals Enter

by Jane Hilberry

Overview

The world extends itself to us. Some refuse the offer, electing to take their own lives. Others pull back, subscribing to fear and the ego’s need for order. Still, the wild, ungovernable forces break through—in this book, in the form of animals: exuberant dogs, deer splintering a fence, bears that slip in through the door of dreams. Hilberry’s poetry explores life’s large energies and our resistances.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597097390
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/11/2016
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Jane Hilberry has written, co-written, and edited several books, including the poetry collection Body Painting (Red Hen Press, 2005), which won the Colorado Book Award and got Hilberry banned from speaking at a Colorado Springs high school. One of the first editors of the Indiana Review, she has also facilitated arts-based leadership development programs at The Banff Centre in Canada and now teaches Creative Writing, Creativity, and Literature at Colorado College.

Table of Contents

1

This Is Mine 19

Weightless 21

A Hole in the Fence 22

The Speeds on the Highway 24

Reading the Bible at Nine 26

To Write My Autobiography 27

1956 28

A for Always 29

In the Yellow House 31

A Seat for Everyone 32

Binocular Vision 33

The Bottle Clock 34

Tailwind 35

Order 36

The Game 37

Outside 38

No More 39

Wormhole 40

We Are Not Made of Sugar 41

2

Very lovely, don't pick it up 45

Possibly, this time 46

The sky watched 48

Rowboat on a Lake of Words 49

New Life 50

Window 52

Childless, She Tends the Garden 53

Her Illness 54

The End Result 55

Young Women on Apartment Lawn 56

Descent 57

The Dead 61

3

Mere Kissing 65

For Us 66

Ours 67

The Women 68

Measures 69

Geometry, Complicated 70

Ac the Parry 73

Silence 74

A Map of Calgary 75

Night Swimming 77

I never liked dogs 78

So the pots in the kitchen rattle so the floors touch our feet 79

Lake Louise 80

I will die 82

Squirrel with an Apple 83

Shadows, Saddle Canyon 84

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In ‘Possibly, This Time,’ Jane Hilberry makes a startling and haunting poem out of the passage of a tick through people’s lives and deaths. Is this possible, you ask? Oh, yes, this and much more. ‘All else, stripped back, came down to love,’ she writes in another poem. Hilberry’s book, Still the Animals Enter, is the record of this stripping down: its glory and its purpose, these poems.”

—Jim Moore

“The poems in Still the Animals Enter evoke an embodiment both tangential and deep. They travel like a bead on a string between a charged, sublime solitude and a nuanced connection with the natural world and the ‘smooth stone’ of the lover’s body. Hilberry has given us something necessary and rare, an adult perspective that does not lose itself in nostalgia or swerve toward loneliness but finds its way to a language of profound erotic vitality. This collection is located at a powerful edge where memory and loss are in contact with a forward-looking present tense, where longing gives way to a deep quiet ‘among the breathing others,’ and where the animals find their way through every barrier to enter the poem—still, and in stillness.”

—Diane Seuss

Editorial Reviews

In  ‘Possibly, This Time,’ Jane Hilberry makes a startling and haunting poem out of the passage of a tick through people’s lives and deaths. Is this possible, you ask? Oh, yes, this and much  more. ‘All else, stripped back, came down to love,’ she writes in another poem. Hilberry’s book, Still the Animals Enter, is the record of this stripping down: its glory and its purpose, these poems.”

—Jim Moore
 

“The poems in Still the Animals Enter evoke an embodiment both tangential and deep. They travel like a bead on a string between a charged, sublime solitude and a nuanced connection with the natural world and the ‘smooth stone’ of the lover’s body. Hilberry has given us something necessary and rare, an adult perspective that does not lose itself in nostalgia or swerve toward loneliness but finds its way to a language of profound erotic vitality. This collection is located at a powerful edge where memory and loss are in contact with a forward-looking present tense, where longing gives way to a deep quiet ‘among the breathing others,’ and where the animals find their way through every barrier to enter the poem—still, and in stillness.”

—Diane Seuss


“In these earth-rich, lush and vibrant poems, Hilberry—by way of her speakers—wrestles with inheritance, with prudence, with fear and desire. These are songs of a long skirmish, songs of a hard-won innocence steeped in experience.  The vision within is both wise and generous.”
—Kate Northrop


 

From the Publisher