Wolf Intervals: Poems

By Graham Hillard

The poems in Graham Hillard's debut collection are personal and world-historical, as remote as fifteenth-century Rome and as near as the American landscape. Here are poems of music, violence, faith, doubt, and the creaturely world, composed in the unignorable shadow of Holy Scripture. Here, too, are childhood and child-rearing, small sagas of fortune and failure across the generations. Like the dissonant chords for which the book is named, Hillard's poems seek resolution but find it only sparingly. A bold and surprising new collection, Wolf Intervals takes place at the heart of that quest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666724615

Graham Hillard

Graham Hillard is managing editor of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and instructor of creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University. He is the founding editor of the Cumberland River Review; a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner, National Review, and other magazines; and the recipient of an individual artist fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission. He lives in Nashville with his wife, daughter, and son.

Book preview

1.png

Wolf Intervals

Graham Hillard

Wolf Intervals

The Poiema Poetry Series

Copyright ©

2022

Graham Hillard. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

, Eugene, OR

97401

.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-3174-3

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-2460-8

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-2461-5

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Hillard, Graham.

Title: Wolf intervals / Graham Hillard.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,

2022

| Series: The Poiema Poetry Series.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-6667-3174-3

(paperback) |

isbn 978-1-6667-2460-8

(hardcover) |

isbn 978-1-6667-2461-5

(ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Poetry. | American poetry—

21

st century.

Classification: PS

617

H

55

2022

(paperback) | PS

617

(ebook)

09/26/22

Table of Contents

Title Page

The Forest

I.

Well Temperament

David and Bathsheba Share a Cigarette

Mikhail Gorbachev Addresses an Auditorium of Southern Baptists

Theodicy

Benediction

Honeysuckle

Genealogy

Proverb

Ezekiel on the Somme

Christ Walks on the Adventure River Wave Pool

The Marine

Wolves

Class Outing, Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland

Slaughterhouse Pond

Pope Calixtus III Excommunicates Halley’s Comet: Rome, 1456

The Other Thief

Elemental

Roman à Clef

II.

The High Branch

Paean (After George Peele)

After Reading ‘Reynard the Fox’

Snow Day

Grammar School: Janitor

At the National D-Day Memorial

The Timpanist

Morning Drop-Off

Proverb

After Flooding

Balletomane

The Censor

The Polygrapher

Manchineel

This

Body Found in Churchill Downs Barn

Lascaux

Grasses

Fires and Tents

III.

Sestina: Peach Tree

Lizard

Grammar School: Textbooks

Grammar School: Evolution

Boxwoods

Oil Painting, Artists’ Colony

Corner Studio, Artists’ Colony

Grammar School: Diagramming the Sentence

Minor Prophet

The Apostle Paul Extends a Metaphor

Wax Bullet

Conjunctivitis

Offering

Miniature Book Collection, Sweet Briar College

Proverb

Art Student

Watching Daybreak on the Savannah

Sunday Sermon

Patriotic Concert, Covenant Presbyterian Church

Acknowledgments

for Mary

Whither thou goest

The wolf made itself heard in the days of unequal temperament.

Frederick Niecks A Concise Dictionary of Musical Terms

The Poiema Poetry Series

Poems are windows into worlds; windows into beauty, goodness, and truth; windows into understandings that won’t twist themselves into tidy dogmatic statements; windows into experiences. We can do more than merely peer into such windows; with a little effort we can fling open the casements, and leap over the sills into the heart of these worlds. We are also led into familiar places of hurt, confusion, and disappointment, but we arrive in the poet’s company. Poetry is a partnership between poet and reader, seeking together to gain something of value—to get at something