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    Practical Water
    Practical Water
    Practical Water
    Ebook168 pages1 hour

    Practical Water

    By Brenda Hillman

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry (2009)
    Runner-up for the Northern California Book Award for Poetry (2009)

    Practical Water is, like Brenda Hillman's previous two books, Cascadia and Pieces of Air in the Epic, both an elemental meditation and an ecopoetics; this time her subject is water: Taoist water, baptismal water, water from the muses' fountains, the practical waters of hydrology from which we draw our being—and the stilled water in a glass in a Senate chamber. Not since Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon has American poetry seen the likes of the hallucinatory wit and moral clarity that Hillman brings to Washington in her poems about Congressional Hearings on the Iraq War. Here also—because it is about many kinds of power—is a sequence of twinned lyrics for the moon, governess of tides and night vision, for visible and invisible faces. Violence and the common world, fact and dream, science and magic, intuition and perception are reconfigured as the poet explores matters of spirit in political life and earthly fate. If it is time to weep by the waters of Babylon, it is also time to touch water's living currents. No one is reimagining the possibilities of lyric poetry with more inventiveness; this is masterful work by one of our finest poets.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2012
    ISBN9780819571113
    Practical Water
    Author

    Brenda Hillman

    Brenda Hillman is the author of 11 books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press. She has co-edited numerous books, including At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets and a recent recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for innovation in literature, she is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and lives in the Bay Area with her husband Robert Hass.

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    • 3/5
      My interest ebbed & flowed while reading Hillman's third installment in her ecopoetic series of books organized around the 4 elements. Cascadia, the first of the series, still ranks number 1 with me.
      I do admire how Hillman is able to blend political activism with sensitivity to both the language and the environment. Language is environment after all.

    Book preview

    Practical Water - Brenda Hillman

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