Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire

Hillman's ninth collection is also the fourth and final book in the poet's imaginative series on the elements after Cascadia (earth), Pieces of Air in the Epic (air), and Practical Water (water). The metaphor's finale, featuring fire, is visually intriguing, with a variety of poetic styles, fonts, and images, but ultimately disappointing. She takes on the difficult task of composing lines based on political themes, referencing drones and the Occupy movement. But concision and music are too often missing—"I'm grateful to Samuel Beckett & to my high school boyfriend whose drunk/ father yelled when we closed the door & read The Unnamable during the Tet/ offensive." Another distraction is the poet's tendency to be too self-referential—"As a heron stalks the smart frog,/ time stabs the mini-brenda"; "Big oil has bought everything but not my/ armpits, which are sweating in solidarity with the Commons before the/ 18th century Enclosure Acts." Hillman's poetic techniques—disjointed syntax, the breaking of words into syllables, startling images—create poems that are too often prosaic with images that are hard to envision. The poems that work best incorporate a sense of wordplay—"the vowel of an owl/ the owl of a vowel/ dives onto a warm body…"; it doesn't make sense but at least it delights.