By Michael Collins
Both in title and subject matter of the many of the poems, Ernest Hilbert’s Storm Swimmer, winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, engages with natural forces in a way relatively unique in the modern world, one in which he is truly encompassed by them. Poems like “Storm Swimmer” come alive in moments of true immersion in waters alive in seldom perceived ways:
Heels sting in marl that loosens like cubes of ice.
The churned-up pits of ocean sear the skin.
Sand slithers. The undertow sucks the shins.
Hail spikes the neck. It’s hard to stand. The sky
And shore are gone. Clamp your eyes. Dive. (1)
These are no metronomic Shakespearean waves[i] ruminatively ticking off the seconds of our lives from the shore. Rather, variations on the pentameter line, internal sound repetitions, and continually refocusing caesuras recreate immediate sensations of the body within the storm. The subjects of nearly all of the sentences are environmental actors. The only one that could be seen as action on the speaker’s part is the imperative, “Dive,” which rings like a self-reflexive command to recover agency amidst the tumult. Although, even this also sounds like an invitation to the reader to enter the storms and depths of the text as well.
It’s interesting to contrast this poem with the one that follows it, “Pelagic,” in which a different manner of approach and natural presence manifests from another kind of ocean encounter:
I face an ocean, its lurid rush and pull
The same as ever, though I have aged.
I step in – small cool splashes on my calves –
Then shoulder through hard linebacker waves. (5)
Here the prosody also recreates experiences: the first step into the waves near shore, the first cold plunge, the breaking wave smacking into the shoulder. However, these mostly end-stopped lines are measured by the speaker’s own gradual process and leave time to consider how we age, the waves of “original sea” playing a role like the self-observing meditative mind, contextualizing itself:
The breakers roll in to hide the beach from me.
I imagine I’m in a world only
Ocean and sky, four billion years ago
Or in a time to come, floating without
The earth to save me, as long as I might. (5)
This experience, the walking and “floating” of which allow for more meditative thought, moves the speaker not incrementally forward toward death, but eons into oceanic pasts and futures, shrinking his own time on earth to a relative decimal. Relinquishing the idea that the earth can “save” him is the mental hinge that turns his thoughts to appreciation of the momentary lived experience of connection with the world that our land lives often obscure.
The poems show, through two experiences of being in water, two experiences of the mind that are both inter-contextualizing and, in discrete lived moments, often apparently mutually exclusive. In one case, the speaker is jostled by surrounding life, vulnerable, required to respond. The other mode is reflective, even approaching quiescence. We are able to see ourselves as small parts of such greater life, integrated uniquely by our ability to bear witness to it – along with our own witnessing.
We can hear echoes of these two perspectives throughout the poems that take place on dry land as well. “Last Rites” presents an interesting comparison to the tumultuous embrace of the ocean in the speaker’s unexpectedly ebullient son:
And there was my son, not yet two years, coming
Across the floor toward me with arms outspread,
His face big with a smile, and he was so strong
And new, unworried blue eyes, becoming
Ever giddier, unbalanced, lunging ahead,
Hoping to fly in that warm light with his father,
To hug me as if for very life, and I wished I could
Stay there always lifting him, laughing, and such
Light linger as if we’re still together (20)
Like “Storm Swimmer” this poem focuses on outside activity, in this case the son’s, surprising the speaker – although in neither case are the outside actions wholly unexpected. The surprises arise from the experience of presence in both poems, in this case the inexplicable love and joy of the young child. This poem provides a new window into the relevance of the natural lessons in “Storm Swimmer,” both in the speaker’s ability to steady himself within the experience and the reflexive injunction to “dive” into its depths. We can see how he does so in this scene, allowing the nearly numinous joy of connection to move though consciousness into the inevitable loss it contains within its life, the amazing result of which is enduring gratitude: “And I will tell you it hurt it was so good, / And I know I’ve had that. I had that much” (20).
“In Paradisum” offers another example of the macrocosmic, meditative mode of “Pelagic”:
I know we’re dust, and stardust too, but more –
Phosphorescent in oceans of sunlight,
Like breaths exhaled, diffusions, traces of song,
Engines firing in the voiceless dark. (66)
“Dust” places us in the context of entropic time, “stardust” of the vastness of outer space, “sunlight” within our own limited solar system that nonetheless holds us impossibly small against its immensity. Yet, smallness is no diminishment, as the lines quickly show. The conclusion indicates that our responses to life, our own evolutionary survival, concurrently inventive and aesthetic, are “like breaths exhaled” full of elements necessary for – or at least a part of – the universe beyond.
As these poems look out from our small, human perspective, others respond with a feature of the mind we’ve only briefly noted here: it’s ability to perceive itself, sometimes as if from – or through the metaphorical lens of – the future. Hilbert displays this ability in several poems involving his own somewhat ingenious conceptions of ghosts, for example, “Voltage Crackles at the Edge”:
My son’s eyes are big. He says we have
To whisper or monsters might come in.
He’s not afraid of ghosts. For him,
They’re only things that can’t be seen.
And what is to be feared in that?
He thinks that he’s a ghost when hiding
Behind the window curtain, though
He cannot resist the giggling fits
That give him away and back to us again. (17)
Ghosts here are seen both through the child’s flexible perspective, not yet calcified by mortality or morality, as well as through the father’s willingness to enter that world in play, see the value in its viewpoint. Particularly important are the role of invisibility as a feature of those outside the group and the child’s ability to see himself on both sides of this permeable boundary. The speaker’s empathetic understanding of the child’s play experience incorporates into his own mature view, in which “outside” is not just a notion relative to place or community – but also time and mortality. At the end of the poem he moves as seamlessly as his son across the his own conception of the boundary between life and death: “And when we’re only ghosts / I know we’ll stay in love, like now” (18).
The poem itself functions as a sort of psychological afterlife-in-the-present, a reflective view as if from after the present that allows it to be cherished in retrospect-like fondness and longing. The ghost represents the part of our own psyche that can look at itself from the outside – or, more in the traditional ghost wheelhouse, from after our death. “Remains” explores this paradox from a more exclusively adult perspective, through the activity of exploring a historical building on vacation:
Yet these are not the ghosts they claim to see.
Those who haunt these halls and frozen hills
Are not scions of the anemic family
That gradually stabbed itself out of existence.
They are really only half-happy souls
Of those who visited once, tourists, who,
On deathbeds back home, gave last thoughts
To a summer day they came to the heights,
Vacation hours that seemed to last so long (47-8)
There’s an affinity, maybe even an overlap, between the experiences of the imagined ghosts and the imaginer. Interestingly, the speaker’s understanding of adult ghosts also includes a theory of mind as to their motivations and unconscious stirrings, some of which are attributed to their “ghost” state, others to their living, vacationing, and dying perspectives, each located in their own temporally identified spheres of the psyche, but also overlapping. We can also see here a more subtle aspect of the “ghost” perspective within the living: Its overlap with the living perceiver-speaker is essential because only living psyche can function as a medium of transformation:
It’s not that they prefer the wet dark.
That’s just how they’re most easily seen.
They’re happiest when they ride the rays
On sunny days that dry them till they’re unseen,
Owning endless thoughts of escape to a place
That was only a prison or a graveyard
To others so unlike them, so long ago. (48)
The reflective “ghost” again illuminates our ability to move “forward” and “backward” in imagined time. However, this poem adds an interesting nuance to this intrapsychic dynamic in that the speaker is also bearing witness to the ghosts themselves, as imagined versions of once living persons. This is an nuanced presentation the interdependence of the practices of self-witnessing and compassion for the other.
Unfortunately, not all ghosts are so welcomingly incorporated into psychological wholeness. The collection also identifies more shadowy specters, usually through recognition of their disavowal by the community or culture to which they represent discouraged aspects. “We Regret” enacts in spliced quotation the psychological deadening to all involved in such hardening of social norms and boundaries, particularly in the creepily threatening pseudo-politeness though which it is delivered:
please don’t take this
the wrong way
we’re wondering
is it true now we know
what you’re going
to say excuse me we’re (50)
Hilbert deftly escalates the condescending chorus of clipped of passive aggressiveness so that it sounds increasingly sinister the closer it slithers:
we always felt something
was we know it’s just
that you’re I know I hate
to have to say this (50)
“Appeal,” on the following page, seems to respond to this corrosively hollow pretense of moral correction through the persona of a social outcast on trial:
They think you know me after all these years,
But you don’t know a thing. I’m the black hole
At the center of our galaxy. Stars eddy
And disappear as if into a drain.
I’m your very own event horizon.
Nothing you understood will make sense
Again. All rise. It’s so familiar now. (51)
This poem shows even more of the range of the collection, incorporating persona as another way of exploring other perspectives. The persona uses disagreeing pronouns to highlight the contradictory way in which those who pretend to speak for a unified society are actually a collection of individuals agreeing to conform to what appears as the accepted narrative. The persona also, like most willing villains, embraces the “good” citizens’ fear of being the outcast as a source of power over them, noting that casting one member as a “black hole” implicitly includes them in “our galaxy.” There is no understanding of psyche without acceptance of shadow. The poem incorporates this insight in complementary ways, allowing the voice to skirt discussing any literal crimes that may have been committed by focusing exclusively on the underlying societal dynamics – and also to clearly present those forces, even incorporating the courtroom theatre of their judgement as the stage for it.
The final line break interestingly implies a cessation in the earlier speakers’ ways of moving in psychological time and incorporating various viewpoints, another unfortunate result of the kinds of closed-minded manipulation presented in “We Regret.” Ironically, the two poems partner to present the ways in which the inflexible boundaries of cultural outcasting are mutually exclusive with imaginative reflection and the balanced valuing of others that it can encourage.
Such impoverishments are palpably tragic in contrast to the many forms of literal and metaphorical connection evoked in other poems, such as “West River Notebook”:
When you work on what you love, and after that day
You might be something else or nothing. What’s in front
Of you is not what you are or were. We’re between
Breaths – the next not entirely ordained. That’s when
And only how it lives: a moment, and what has been
May never have cause to come again,
Just as night arrives, making the water black, and we
See a sleeping ship, its lights holding it so we can see. (31)
Notice the foregrounded flexibility of identity in the opening, a manifestation of both psychological dexterity and a thorough understanding and acceptance of impermanence achieved through it. The image of the ship’s light has the function of safety and communication, but the speaker sees into this more deeply, a self-disclosure that is also a light in the dark for others awaiting “not entirely ordained” next moments of connection.
A similar conception appears from the light-casting perspective in “On Cape Charles”:
In the humid dark I feel a storm move closer,
But it’s impossible to know where.
It’s like a weight in darkness.
I must swim back, but I stay, drying,
My beacon aimed at the night,
A signal, a warning and little else,
Until another light will show itself. (36)
The distance between the speaker and those with whom he would communicate through the lights can help us to understand the movements in psychological time we discussed earlier. These small beacons of connection and communication must take place because of the dark, but at the same time, they can only take place because of the dark, similar to the way in which the speaker’s moments of light with his son deepen by contrast to the reflections from futures in which those moments have inevitably passed. These poems – and the spaces for reflection and connection between them – offer profound opportunities for readers to rediscover where we are right now when we see ourselves from such lights miles or years away.
[i] Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the… | Poetry Foundation
You can find the book here: Storm Swimmer
Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines. He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. Visit notthatmichaelcollins.com.
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North of Oxford 