ROBERT HASS & BRENDA HILLMAN
About this Event
SEBASTOPOL --
Copperfield's Books is honored to welcome two of America's most celebrated poets—Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass and acclaimed poet Brenda Hillman—for a rare evening of poetry, conversation, and reflection in Sebastopol.
Together, Hass and Hillman will discuss their remarkable new books, A Third Commonness and Still House in the Desert: An Eco-Contemplation, exploring the intersections of poetry, landscape, memory, ecology, and the ways language shapes our understanding of the natural world.
Join us for an intimate reading and conversation followed by a live audience Q&A and book signing.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is recommended, as seating is limited.
About Still House in the Desert: An Eco-Contemplation:
Meditations on time, space, and objects in houses, as well as lives of children, mothers, and non-human creatures in domestic spaces
Each of Brenda Hillman's books has been transformative for her readers, and her twelfth collection is no exception. Building on previous volumes about seasons, days and minutes, Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-twentieth century. Here, magical poems explore rooms as opportunities for dream, and domestic objects as the dream-shapes where culture and imagination inform each other. In that way, the poet celebrates the layered lives of children and adults, including, strikingly, the life of her mother, a native of Brazil whose presence intimately links the processes of inner vision and daily tasks. Like Hillman's other pioneering work, these poems are personal and collective; they braid the spiritual, the scientific, the political, and the visionary. Short spare lyrics are placed beside longer pieces; small photos add to the visual structures of the pages. One long prose poem explores the child's neurological anxiety and the awakening of mid-century environmental consciousness, while another is a meditation on women's domestic work with textiles and the rhetoric of literary repetition. The closing sequence gives homage to unlikely intersections of humans with non-human lives, including dust mites, moths, and mycorrhizal roots. This remarkable collection will plunge readers into the mysteries of childhood and of childhood houses everywhere.
Author: Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona, and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books and is the author of twelve full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022), Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), winner of the Northern California Book Award.
About A Third Commonness:
Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass explores poetry for what it is: a relationship between people and the land.
In A Third Commonness, US Poet Laureate Robert Hass follows a literary river through time and topography--from Zen Buddhism to California ecopoetics, from Barry Lopez to Walt Whitman, and even through an unlikely fellowship between Kentucky poet-priests. Told through essays and lectures, A Third Commonness is as much a love letter to landscape as it is a sprawling exploration of poetic heritage. Hass weaves histories with the boundless hand of a passionate reader inseparable from literary vitality. Hass revels at genius, saying, Here it is, this stretch of it. Sometimes with a requiem, other times with romance or political reckoning, Hass returns to the amazements of a poetry that encounters itself over and again, beckoned into being by some "propelling force."
Author: Robert Hass--poet, critic, and teacher--is one of the most renowned figures of modern American literature, serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995-1997. In 2007, he was awarded the National Book Award and shared the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. Hass is also the author of Field Guide (1972), Praise (1979), Twentieth Century Pleasures (1984), and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (2018), among other works. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Saint Mary's College of California, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics until his retirement in 2019.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00 to USD 31.00
