April Review by David Hartnett (daithí)
April is a Bully
April pries you loose from winter, kicks your fingers
off the icy ledge, forces you to look outside
as black-rutted frozen ground races to collide
with your too-soon-unbooted feet. Deep damp lingers …
(“April is a Bully,” from Wild Earth, 2022).
Most folks who live in Vermont are aware that April, known as the fifth Season, also tagged as Mud Season, is upon us or all over us. Perhaps to present events to counterbalance such a sloppy season, it has now become the month in which we celebrate Poetry for the duration.
Recently, I came across 3 poetry collections by Cindy Ellen Hill. She is “an environmental attorney, writer, musician, and obsessed gardener.” Evidence of her knowledge in these fields permeates her craft.
For anyone who wishes to study the sonnet structure, the Wild Earth offers a wide variety of sonnets. In fact, if you go to the back pages, you will see that she has Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Bowlesian, and Spenserian sonnets. If you happen to be well-versed in the form, then you can savor them.
Something entirely different, yet finely crafted can be found in Mosaic, published in 2024. Cindy Ellen Hill ventures over to Italy to visit family. I liken this book to a sketch book that shows how various layers or surfaces are pieced together, as happens in mosaics. Included are some completed poems as well as observational notes or sketches. The poet has offered glimpses of her visit to Italy with a never-blinking eye. Her description of the landscape, the newly arrived migrants, the naive but insatiable tourists, as well as the displaced, is worth taking in. Here is what she has written about Bolzano:
The past is not the only source material for the city’s mosaic of introspection.They are stacking and sorting elements of the present: climate change, flooding, and drought; vacillating economies in which tourists stay home or go elsewhere; immigration; electrical power needs; food scarcity. They set their mosaic of the past in juxtaposition to the mosaic of the present…
(“Bolzano: A Mosaic Essay,” from Mosaic: Poems from Travels in Italy, 2024)
Elegy for the Trees presents a third perspective within very tightly crafted poems. Several levels of gleaning are necessary to fully gather the breadth and scope of what the poetry set contains. Her understanding of how trees have been damaged through climate change demonstrates a chronology of sicknesses within the woodlands. But Cindy Ellen Hill’s familiarity with trees goes deeper. She refers to ogham in a poem by that same name. Such a reference leans on trees leading to the first alphabet in Old Irish. Each tree in the forest had different branchings that became different letters in their alphabet. Ellen’s musical knowledge shares a Celtic root as well. And her rhythms are detectable in her use of sound in her poems. For anyone who has yet to follow various encroachments upon trees, this collection serves as a guide to botany as well. There are so many worthwhile poems to be found in Elegy for the Trees. The one that points toward a new direction is “Should Trees Have Standing.” The shift from Roman law turns more toward Brehon law, where restoration, rather than retribution, of a much larger community (or biome) is at stake:
Trees stand. But should they speak? Two great grey owls
dropped their appellate briefs in round pellets
along the marbled hall. The judges growled,
“How can feathered rats argue the merits?..”
We may find ourselves lost in a different kind of woods than Dante–one in which beings there are given the same legal rights as humans or corporations. So, in this month of April, I encourage you to read one of Cindy Ellen Hill’s poetry books. You will not be disappointed.