This Awkward Art
By Conrad Hilberry & Jane Hilberry

Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk

Mayapple Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0932412829
perfect bound, 51 pp., $13.95

This Awkward Art, by Conrad Hilberry and Jane Hilberry, is a graceful and unusual book. As the subtitle indicates, it is a book of Poems by a Father and Daughter, poems written and published separately but brought together here where their intersection is evident. Daughter and father both write about Marion, the lost mother/wife. Father and daughter both write about Katharine, the lost daughter/sister. The intersections are clearly marked, with section titles, and the reader should surely stop and look both ways.

The first section title is Adam, a child Conrad compares to “the first Adam” as someone “setting out to name / the colors, faces, lights” of his first Christmas, “this blurred and lushly / peopled garden—// before any of it / needs to be redeemed” and whom Jane identifies as the “X of treasure, nexus of love.” Father and daughter are in agreement here about this little grandchild/nephew being the center of love and joy.

Both poets take on their grief for Katharine, the girl lost when she fell from a train, in multiple poems. In some, Katharine is a “she,” but in others, both father and sister address her as “you,” where she lives on in memory and imagination. And both poets have turned to the sea as a container for their grief. “The sea breaks,” says Conrad, in the poem “Sea”:

… I turn
and take it, a monk’s
hood over my head,
then dive into a wave,
feeling the heave and slough
as tangled water passes.

As the poem goes on, we are out there with him, the water could take him, we fear he will let it. And then:

Shouts from the beach. Another girl,
alive, runs to taste the cold
in a single dash and fall.
She swims out, and I crawl
over the curl of breakers
toward the lame and slippery shore.

In an astonishing parallel structure, dawn breaks as Jane, in the poem “No Trouble,” imagines her mother in the moment of childbirth:

How quiet it was, just before 4 a.m.,
the dark thinning, not a car on the street,
the stars burning coldly.

In the second stanza, Jane imagines a home birth, at Dr. Ann’s house, her mother “in her street clothes, something pressed and stylish.” And why shouldn’t imagining one’s own birth have the surrealism of a dream? Then grief resumes, side by side with a mother’s joy, in the last stanza, and it is still dark, and still dawn:

I wish I could remember how my mother smelled
when I first lay down on her chest,
what her voice sounded like inside her body,
whether she smiled or cried. I know she wanted me,
without thinking, the way women did in April
of 1958, in Greencastle, Indiana,
on the 26 th day of the month,
just as the dark was thinning.

There are other lovely intersections in this quietly astonishing book. Both poets write of snow, of baking, crickets, bones, and paintings by Vermeer. And both poets do what they do in This Awkward Art with amazing grace.

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Kathleen Kirk is a poet and fiction writer whose work appears online and in print in Apparatus, After Hours, Leveler, Oklahoma Review, Poems & Plays, Willow Review, and elsewhere. She has three poetry chapbooks—Selected Roles (Moon Journal Press, 2006), Broken Sonnets (Finishing Line Press, 2009), and Living on the Earth (Finishing Line Press, 2010, New Women’s Voices Series #74). She writes about what people are reading in her blog at http://kathleenkirkpoetry.blogspot.com/.

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