Donna Hilbert fuses memory, childhood, and life
You reach a point in your life (notice I said “point,” not “age,” but “age” works, too) when everything reminds you of something. It’s not so much that you realize, in the words from Ecclesiastes, that there’s nothing new under the sun, as much as it is being constantly reminded of something you experienced or someone you knew. It might be the face of the supermarket checker, or the way light and shadow appear on a door, or the smell of flowers. I can smell sweet pea flowers and suddenly I’m eight or nine, sitting by the fence of my friend Paul Brown down the street, playing the Battle card game.
It was that infusion of memory, childhood, and life that kept coming to mind as I read Enormous Blue Umbrella, the new collection by Donna Hilbert. The poems are not a chronological walk from childhood to adulthood. Instead, they are about present things that have been strongly shaped by the past, about how we view the world has deep roots in our earliest memories.
It might be, as Hilbert describes in the title poem, what we think and remember as we walk along a southern California beach, as, across the water, “Catalina shines like tinfoil.” Or what that iron skillet, used by your great-grandmother, might tell you as you blacken a sea bass. Or how chocolate milk serves as a comfort food, because it did exactly that when you were a child.
In relatively short poems written in simple, direct language, Hilbert describes short walks, explains why she loves the color purple, experiences music, considers a heron, rediscovers love, and finds grace in the coffee pot. One of the most moving poems in the collection is about grief, where the past and the present come together in the same moment.
Because We Grieve
Because we grieve,
I hold you close.
And, from another plane
a current enters us both,
grown women
who need a mother,
who need a daughter.
We are fastened now,
until we don’t know
whose heart is beating
in which body,
or who is breathing,
or what god to thank
for hurtling this bolt
shocking us back
into our altered selves.
Donna Hilbert
Hilbert previously published Threnody (2022), Gravity: New & Selected Poems (2018), The Green Season (2009), Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems (2004), and Transforming Matter (2000), among several others. She also published a collection of short stories, Women Who Make Money and the Men Who Love Them. Grief Becomes Me: A Love Story is a documentary about her life and work and the death of her husband. She lives in Long Beach, California, where she writes and teaches private workshops.
Enormous Blue Umbrella offers a memory and a connection with every poem. Hilbert finds the wonder in the simple things, and she soon has the reader doing exactly the same thing.
Related:
Poets and Poems: Donna Hilbert and Threnody
Photo by Martin Fisch, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- Poets and Poems: Donna Hilbert and “Enormous Blue Umbrella” - February 13, 2025
- Poetry as Autobiography: Hannah Sullivan and Richard Eyre - February 11, 2025
- Donald Hall and Andrew Motion Write Poetic Memoirs - February 6, 2025
Donna J Hilbert says
Thank you so much!!!
Bethany R. says
What a beautiful featured poem! Thank you for sharing this with the world.