Black Hollyhock, First Light

Judyth Hill is a stand-up bard--a funny performance poet and a passionate advocate of The Tradition and The Muse. Deep Ecology elder Dolores LaChapelle has described Hill as a poet who 'puts place and sex and love together in a way that is totally environmentally aware and totally human.' She has been called 'energy with skin' and a rabbi of the miraculous. Her work is exuberant in its sustained electricity between self and world, its rhapsody with the other-than-human, and the singing of its alert and crafted language. This new collection contains poems that reflect the abundance of life--full of itch, of heat, the flavor of apricots, yearning fox howls, a shrine filled with acorns, good coffee, the scent of the imaginary wafting off the sensuous curves of real bread, and thick cumulus clouds drifting over the front range at the end of the valley. When, like an impenetrable crowd at a coronation, the Divine surrounds the smallest, ordinary evidence of its own magnificence, Judyth Hill lifts us with a laugh up onto the tearful diligent shoulders of her poems to catch a glimpse.--Martn Prechtel