Practical Water
BY Brenda Hillman
(Wesleyan University Press, 2009)

Perhaps I am alone in my unease with acknowledging technology in poems: quoting important news I receive via email, I cite a “message,” as if embossed envelopes greeted us, Legends of Zelda-style, revolving in air. There is something about today’s technology that is noisy, distracting; for me, it interrupts the poem. If my fear is of losing a poem to specifics that are too topical to the immediate present, a poet who can allow the messy details of our contemporary world to visit, but not overwhelm — or even date — a poem earns my immediate respect. Brenda Hillman does just that in linking our littered, branded, ringing, pinging present with the universal. The very “Diet Pepsi plastic on its side” near a creek bed sings of the ruin we do — to a place, to a moment — simply by trying to experience it. Ironically, the female speaker and her companions in “Enchanted Twig” have come to this creek in search of fresh water:

Hillman, an environmental advocate and an activist with the anti-war group Code Pink, extends this problem of ego inflicted upon landscape from the individual to the social. The tension mounts in “In a Senate Armed Services Hearing,” one of several poems in which the natural infuses the municipal — indeed, was always at its heart. A senator, that grey flannel-cased speaker and signer, is exposed for a mammal by the speaker, who notices the “prickly intimate hairs between his ears.” His colleagues, more mammals with “kids with stuff to do, folks with cancer,” are pair- and group-bonded fauna and wishing themselves back to their dens. They are in the unique, and seemingly arbitrary position of being animals capable of deciding the fate of other animals. Dens will be exploded, the young ripped out, for the sake of the painted stripe walling off “American interests.”

Even in this plaster-sealed compound, the senators are not isolated from the rest of nature: a lone fly buzzes in the neutral space of the room, where flowers on the carpet register electromagnetically. The air, the still water in the classes, the animal breath are a continuous medium. In this unity of vitreous and nerve signals, divine and material, too, are of a piece: the thought of a goddess weeping over broken folk is nearly enough to induce her to “rain her tears” upon