Practical Water Book

Brenda Hillman's seventh and most recent collection of poetry, "Practical Water," is more reminiscent in style to her first published collection, "White Dress," than "Cascadia," which was published in 2001. While still multi-faceted in ideas and meaning, Hillman's poems in "Practical Water" are for the most part shorter and less abstract on first read. Divided into four distinct sections, Hillman's work is bound together by an overarching motif of the natural world, especially water-based ecosystems. The poems themselves touch on politics, history, motherhood, environmental responsibility, and - as with her earlier work - question the meaning and place of poetry in our twenty-first century.

Hillman introduces several new poetic devices into her work with "Practical Water." First, she includes two essays in the collection. Neither is more than two pages long, and both challenge the conventional understanding of the form. They employ short, grammatically incomplete sentences which give the reader an impression of reading poetry in block-text form as much as prose. "The eighties: an essay" is a nearly stream-of-consciousness response to the question "what was at stake for you in the eighties?" and paints a portrait of the public and private, the political, ecological and the personal. "Reportorial poetry, trance & activism: an essay" is much more expository in form, explaining the technique of trance writing and the author's application of it during political protests at congress. Still, here, the writing often feels poetic with the inclusion of lines such as, "If bees can detect ultraviolet rays, there are surely more possibilities in language & government. The possible is boundless."

Another new technique for Hillman in "Practical Water" is the inclusion of photos at the bottom of a number of her poems. The collection's afterword explains that many of these were taken by the author herself, and each offers an additional insight into the context or situation that inspired the poem above it. The photos range from aerial photos of dams and reservoirs to photos of birds, wetlands and political protests. Though small in size and printed in black and white (the reader often needs to squint to make out the image) I found that they did offer more context in less space than would have been possible with a textual element such as footnotes.

The third section of "Practical Water" offers another interesting combination of poetic techniques for the reader. Subtitled "(of the months when you work & the months when you can't)", it includes a series of poems titled after each month of the year, starting with "September moon" and concluding with "August moon." Each of these poems, except "August Moon," includes a shadow poem on the right-hand half of the page, printed in grey text. The poems feel very documentary in nature (an effect that is heightened by the inclusion of photographs at the bottom of each column on the page), and the content of the poem and shadow poem contrast each other. In this sense, the entire section could be seen as presenting a diary of a year, including both the ying & yang of each month. "September moon" for example, offers a poem about walking the speaker's mother, while the shadow poem documents an act of civil disobedience. The final poem in the section, a 'shadow' poem also entitled "September Moon" concludes with a photo of the author's second wedding. The fact that the poems start with September may also be a reference to the author's experience as a mother, whose life is suddenly dictated by the academic calendar as her daughter grows older.

Motherhood is one theme that can be found in "Practical Water," presented most directly in the poem "Girl Sleuth," in which the speaker observes the progress of a young girl learning to read. Politics is also much more explicitly discussed in this collection, particularly the politics surrounding the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Several poems, including "Ballad at the State Capitol," "In a Senate Armed Services Hearing," and "Dragonskin" all address the war and its consequences on American lives. The essay "Reportorial poetry, trance & activism" includes a forceful call to action and community organization. Environmental issues are also prominent in this collection. Many times, Hillman extols the beauty of the natural world through documentary poetics without explicitly making a call for change or action. Other poems, such as the 10 page "Hydrology of California: an ecopoetical alphabet" or "Request to the Berkeley City Council concerning Strawberry Creek" leave less doubt as to the consequences of human development on the environment.

Hillman nevertheless questions the impact of her own activist poetry in "Economics in Washington," where she writes, "This isn't a political poem / there are no results in poetry." (pg.53) Yet upon finishing the collection, it becomes clear to the reader that "Practical Water" is an intervention, a poetic call to consider our actions at home and abroad, and consider the value of what's around us. Highly recommended.