Still the Animals Enter

(Paperback)

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Description

The world extends itself to us. Some refuse the offer, electing to take their own lives. Others pull back, subscribing to fear and the ego's need for order. Still, the wild, ungovernable forces break through--in this book, in the form of animals: exuberant dogs, deer splintering a fence, bears that slip in through the door of dreams. Hilberry's poe

Reviews

"In 'Possibly, This Time, ' Jane Hilberry makes a startling and haunting poem out of the passage of a tick through people's lives and deaths. Is this possible, you ask Oh, yes, this and much more. 'All else, stripped back, came down to love, ' she writes in another poem. Hilberry's book, Still the Animals Enter, is the record of this stripping down: its glory and its purpose, these poems."

"The poems in Still the Animals Enter evoke an embodiment both tangential and deep. They travel like a bead on a string between a charged, sublime solitude and a nuanced connection with the natural world and the 'smooth stone' of the lover's body. Hilberry has given us something necessary and rare, an adult perspective that does not lose itself in nostalgia or swerve toward loneliness but finds its way to a language of profound erotic vitality. This collection is located at a powerful edge where memory and loss are in contact with a forward-looking present tense, where longing gives way to a deep quiet 'among the breathing others, ' and where the animals find their way through every barrier to enter the poem--still, and in stillness."

--Diane Seuss

"In these earth-rich, lush and vibrant poems, Hilberry--by way of her speakers--wrestles with inheritance, with prudence, with fear and desire. These are songs of a long skirmish, songs of a hard-won innocence steeped in experience. The vision within is both wise and generous."
--Kate Northrop

Author Bio

Jane Hilberry has written, co-written, and edited several books, including the poetry collection Body Painting (Red Hen Press, 2005), which won the Colorado Book Award and got Hilberry banned from speaking at a Colorado Springs high school. One of the first editors of the Indiana Review, she has also facilitated arts-based leadership development programs at The Banff Centre in Canada and now teaches Creative Writing, Creativity, and Literature at Colorado College.