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    Until the Full Moon Has Its Say
    Until the Full Moon Has Its Say
    Until the Full Moon Has Its Say
    Ebook63 pages18 minutes

    Until the Full Moon Has Its Say

    By Conrad Hilberry

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    About this ebook

    The poems in Until the Full Moon Has Its Say were inspired by the loss of poet Conrad Hilberry’s wife of fifty-six years, Marion. While the poems in this volume delve into the initial emptiness and hopelessness of grieving, the poet’s connections to the natural world, music, and other people ultimately bring him back into the present while still acknowledging and honoring the past. The work of a skilled poet with a lifetime of experience, this collection displays Hilberry’s mastery of form. The book’s three sections include a sonnet, five villanelles, and a variety of stanza structures, all written in his signature tone, which is contemplative, tender, and moving.

    The elegant poems of Until the Full Moon Has Its Say arise from the consideration of ordinary, even humble, subjects—a bowl on a table, a blackout, mosquitoes, garlic mustard, algae on the local pond. Hilberry’s relaxed voice is wise and measured even in the depths of grief, as he muses, “How can I draw dead branches / in a poem?” Part of the answer to that question lies in the use of form, which gives shape to experience. In his formal virtuosity, Hilberry even writes a villanelle—a notoriously difficult poetic form—about writing a villanelle.

    Written by the poet in his eighties, Until the Full Moon Has Its Say is a powerful reflection on mortality and on the art that has been his lifelong practice. All readers of poetry will treasure this powerful volume.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWayne State University Press
    Release dateFeb 10, 2014
    ISBN9780814340257
    Until the Full Moon Has Its Say
    Author

    Conrad Hilberry

    Conrad Hilberry is emeritus professor of English at Kalamazoo College and author of several books of poetry, including The Fingernail of Luck, Player Piano, and Sorting the Smoke, and co-editor of Contemporary Michigan Poetry: Poems from the Third Coast (Wayne State University Press, 1988).

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      Book preview

      Until the Full Moon Has Its Say - Conrad Hilberry

      Group.

      One

      April

      April takes down my love—

      wrong season for dying.

      Even the box elder,

      hunching into the clouds,

      is blooming, branching,

      leaving.

      She’s leaving,

      half-aware in the tilted bed,

      breath barely coming,

      then not. Jaws

      clamped around a scrap

      of tongue. Her warm body

      gone cooler, cold.

      Hospice to wash her.

      Two mortuary men.

      What had been touch

      and talk, ripe fruit,

      red wine:

      a stalk

      in a winter field.

      Villanelle for Marion

      My glass was empty then.

      Barmaid, lift the spigot, let it run.

      Still empty. Then a dark-haired one

      found me under some banyan

      tree, imagining love, alone.

      My glass was empty then.

      She knew the January sky, and June,

      had a touch to nudge the season—

      empty, full. I’ll take the dark-haired one.

      She knew the streets of Paris, London,

      hitchhiked south along the Seine,

      finding no glass empty then.

      We cooked up lunch in Madison,

      two-handled bowl of bluefin,

      noodles, peas—a savory one

      to feed the co-op. Found a path down

      to Lake Mendota, spring rain,

      swamp grass, no glass empty then—

      dipper full, the spring, a dark-haired one.

      Memory

      Everything that was—touch

      football in the street, Peggy

      McKay in the hay

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