In a Few Minutes Before Later

“Yet experience had gathered itself, dark-eyed,” observes the Los Angeles Times Book Award–winning Hillman (Practical Water), whose latest poetry collection gathers meditations on time, nature, contemporary life, social justice, and “the ragged white moth of history” in one gorgeous stampede. These are all big poems, fully observed and richly packed with Hillman’s customary linguistic brio. The opening section takes us through landscapes marked by owl calls and cellphones, where “even outdoors there’s a stress/ you can’t get out of”; one poem notes, “there was a feeling/ right before/ the feeling,” a sentiment echoed in the title of a later poem that captures our desire to snag the ineffable—in poetry and in life. The fine poem “People’s Emotions in One City Block” shifts wittily and insightfully through the lives of pedestrians in an urban park, while elsewhere Hillman assesses a time when “laws were not working so we went outside// after the shootings” and the anxiety behind the pointed question “How do you hope to survive?” Yet there’s a visceral toughness here, a “going-on regardless”; and as Hillman muses, “sometimes I’m called an ‘activist-poet,’ maybe to make my aesthetically odd poetry seem more relevant or marketable,” it is clear she’s not here to lecture or bemoan but to share.