Brother Salvage (Poems) by Rick Hilles
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. 88 pp. $14.00
Reviewed by Tom Haushalter
12.18.06
If Brother Salvage were Rick Hilles’, say, third collection, not his first as it is; if the versatility and dynamism of voice in these poems signaled a poet’s maturation from the safer outings of his youth; if we could’ve foreseen this kind of command of histories and their peculiar narrators, the book would merely astonish. Instead, Rick Hilles has leapt onto poetry’s stage in a debut both transporting and grounding, clever though never once inclined to wink at you.
Appearing early, the title poem, “Brother Salvage: a genizah,” sets a tone of great symbolic consequence here—telling of a man’s path to the discovery of his brother’s fate in the Holocaust via letters and other texts made sacred simply by having been concealed for many years, hidden because they are dangerous and, thus, hallowed. Hilles manages the dangerous territory delicately, and before the bell tolls on lyric interpretations of this dark era of human history, he gleans from it a new despair with lines like “There are whole weeks when life / is little more than the quandary of being a man // dressed in flames who must keep running to put / himself out.”
In fact, interpretation is not Hilles’ mode; he flat-out inhabits the poems, their narrators, even the scenic imagery. The burrowing description of the trees in “Yom HaShoah in Florida”—their “dreadlocks of hanging Spanish moss / sun bleached ash-blue and swaying”—is ekphrasis as relentless as it is unforgiving. Or when Hilles assumes the voices of characters historically based—among them William Blake’s wife (“A Visionary’s Company), the German romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (“Novalis”)—he avoids sounding as though intent on arranging facts lyrically, instead recasts them as newfound myths.
For all the book’s European seriousness, though, Brother Salvage makes the autobiographical series of poems, “Flashlight Stories,” its brilliant, presumably Midwestern, core. “The women in this family play pinochle,” the poem opens, “smoke, toss back salted nuts with the dregs / of their drinks.” Each of the twelve parts of the poem remains local, as if hemmed in, landlocked, unable yet to realize the possibility of a later poem like “All Soul’s Eve,” which takes place in a military cemetery in Krakow. Mundanely set, these snapshots of Hilles’ youth resound, quite literally as he teaches himself electric guitar: A smeared note swells and scatters / like a voice inside a cave, tugging / the vibrato till the sound divides // like an egg yolk dropped in broth…” And moments later, he tears it up: “the whole house / breaking in the sound of surf, the echoes / rattling the bookshelves, even without a sound.”
On two occasions does something take place in the dank hull of “a local Y,” and few passages startle with as much clarity as the one in which Hilles encounters “the sun-scorched janitor” in the boiler room, who tells of a sexual escapade in Vietnam. Despite the unbearable weight of the ordinary—normalcy’s low center of gravity—unstable characters populate “Flashlight Stories” and form its emotional axle—an ailing mother and father, the fear of his own heart “pre-set to detonate” by the time he is 30.
Thankfully, survival and a sense of hope are the outcome of pains in Brother Salvage. Though not metrically reigned, the poems have a formal shape—Hilles is fond of tercets and quatrains—vehicles he has no trouble navigating. In “Preparing for Flight,” for instance, Hilles even makes the process of composition delightfully transparent, riffing on a quote from Steve Martin’s The Jerk. And bless the anomalies in the collection like “The Four-Legged Man”—in which the inner-freak is courted—and “Song for an Empty Hand,” which borders on preciousness but wins with this crisp view inward: “In the long night of the body, the mind / climbs out of its snail-shell ear. Like an owl. / Its head turns, impossibly around, before it flies / over whole continents of feeling.”
“Whole continents of feeling,” traversed with just the right restraint on sentimentalism, unfold gracefully as would a map, but Brother Salvageappropriately resists neat refolding. Like sacred texts carried out of a genizah, their musty hiding place, and stacked high, these poems, once open, remain open, spread out on a table, looming large, entertaining every tempered curiosity.