New Poetry collection: Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide Press
Pre-order it here
Praise for Enormous Blue Umbrella:
Donna Hilbert is a master of the shorter poem. Like Jean Valentine and Kay Ryan before her, she constructs intricate yet accessible pieces so seamlessly built, so filled with quiet wonder, that you want to go back and read them again just to see how it was done. The new poems in Enormous Blue Umbrella are no exception, as Hilbert once again brings her artist's sharp eye to the everyday world, asking: "Who wouldn't want to capture light/the way a child traps fireflies/on a summer night?" Savor these open-hearted poems, and "greet again the great window opening" inside of you.
— James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Courage & Self-Compassion
Who wouldn't want to capture light, asks Donna Hilbert in her full-throated collection Enormous Blue Umbrella, and believe me reader, she does, offering poems bursting with authenticity and a musicality of language. Here an iron skillet, there a finicky coffee pot, dreams of big purple hair and peach lips, herons, barnacles, boats, a menagerie of life experiences balanced on the eyelash/ of a blinking god, shadowed by an overarching presence of grief's bad weather. I admire the wisdom in this voice and the way the poet greets each new unpredictable day with so much forgiveness and grace.
— Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate, author of Dirt Songs
An oceanic backdrop takes us from grief to rebirth, and all the life that happens while we're on the mend, as scales weigh present joys against past losses. Donna Hilbert embraces her mind's oscillations as she navigates new ways to fall in love with the world. Poems in Enormous Blue Umbrella offer notes of tranquil bliss tinged with bittersweetness. Hilbert excites the imagination with swift poetic turns that will grip readers.
— Mark Danowsky, editor of ONE ART: a journal of poetry, author of Take Care
Like a clever chef, able to make a delicious stew from scraps, Donna Hilbert takes what is broken, flawed and imperfect, then she transforms these unlikely ingredients into poems that are nourishing, generous and charged with praise. These short poems are unswervingly human as they take us from the back deck to the deli to the dentist, and they remind us how to find sweetness in honeysuckle, how to celebrate the blank page of a day, how to listen as morning itself sings.
— Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of The Poetic Path on the Ritual app.
Donna's poetry can be found in two new anthologies:
The Wonder of Small Things - Poems of Peace and Renewal
and
Poetry of Presence II - More Mindfulness Poems
Praise for Threnody
Review of Threnody at Tweetspeak
Order it now
"Say desire, which is the boat," writes Donna Hilbert in her newest collection of spare and poignant poems, Threnody...a lament, a wailing. Loss figures prominently in these poems, the devastating loss of her beloveds: her husband, tiny kittens, the felled trees where familiar herons had raised their young, dead seabirds lying on the sand, her mother--but what carries the poet forward is the thirst for beauty and presence. Desire keeps the poet and her reader floating over the abyss of despair...desire for full awareness, the longing to appreciate all of life, including everything from the hummingbird to the powerline. Coming through personal loss and then a pandemic, the poet gently shows the reader how to carry on, "In a fit of hope I wash and press white shirts..." and reminds us of the simple rituals like making risotto, "stirring until everything is tender," and listening to Beethoven. "I have had my fill of things that shine" the poet writes, inviting us into a deeper way of being. Rinsed of the superficial, Hilbert confronts what it means to be truly alive, knowing everything she loves is ephemeral. Daily she feeds crows, walks the beach, and claims: "Even a bird blind/might be a kind/of altar." - Heather Swan, author of A Kinship with Ash
Donna Hilbert is an American classic, one of those poets whose work will read for a long time to come. Threnody is a song of loss, but it also shows us how song conquers loss, or at least makes it bearable. Hilbert is not only in the tradition of Dickinson, Frost, and Stevens; she also carries on the older tradition of the Greek Anthology. Her taut epigrams make us feel the day-to-day reality of grief: "In the dishwasher, / nothing but spoons." It is poems like these that Kenneth Burke called "equipment for living." We need them.
- George Franklin, author of Noise of the World
In this haunting collection, a "layer cake of sorrow" and "oceans empty from my eyes" co-exist alongside "water/ startled blue with sunlight." Our complicated world turns through these pages, fullness of day and night achingly present. Donna Hilbert offers a meal "plain/ enough to be communion." She also offers a sky aloft with egrets, herons, crows, sparrows, cardinals, and blackbirds in these swift-winged, wide-awake poems.
- Laura Grace Weldon, author of Portals
Donna Hilbert's Threnody is a powerful evocation of loss and grief, a lamentation for her late husband, cut down in a senseless accident. Life must go on—the passage of seasons; the ever-present birds outside, crows, herons, pelicans; and the people in her life, friends, family, and strangers—but it will never be the same. Everything is a reminder of that loss and others: the smell of rosemary while cooking; the distant figure of a man walking a dog, lean and fit and unreachable. For Donna, the endurance is all: "I dress, lace my shoes, set out for a walk to start one more day in the dark."
- Tim Gallagher, author of The Grail Bird and Falcon Fever
Here are three poems from Donna's book Threnody
Lyric Life podcast featuring Donna's short poem Rosemary
Two more poems by Donna
Threnody a new poetry collection from Moon Tide Press
"Though Hilbert grapples with weighty and difficult subjects, her tone is refreshingly anti-maudlin. Precise details of Southern California-- including movies--so infuse the spirit of these poems that in every one is a spark of light and even joy." -Denise Duhamel
"There is nothing stale and conventional here, just the presence, so rare in poetry, of Beauty, Suffering, and Intelligence." -Edward Field
"At every turn, this poet surprises with her beguiling wit, and then the sudden plunge into the depths--" -Janet Sternburg
"Not since Spoon River Anthology have I seen such a cluster of vivid portraits and scenes from American life. Deep Red could be the first installment of a new classic." -Edward Field
Second Edition of Gravity: New & Selected Poems from Moon Tide Press, Spring 2025
Video credit: Jacob Hilbert
With Kari Gunter Seymour, Connie Post, and Amy Baskin at AWP2023
With Scott Ferry at AWP 2023
Signing books at Moon Tide Press table AWP 2023
Signing advance copies of Threnody with Moon Tide Press publisher Eric Morago
With Sonia Greenfield at AWP 2017, Washington DC
Donna in front of "The Coop" at Write On Door County
Donna with poet/book artist Diane LeBlanc
Donna with poet/artist Sharon Auberle
Donna Hilbert was born in Grandfield, Oklahoma near the Oklahoma Texas border, but has spent most of her life in Southern California. She is a graduate of California State University, Long Beach, with a B.A. in Political Science, and from Phillips Graduate Institute, with an M.A. in Marriage and Family Therapy. Her books include Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018, The Congress of Luminous Bodies, Aortic Books, 2013, The Green Season, World Parade Books, 2009, Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems, PEARL Editions, 2004; Transforming Matter, PEARL 2000; Feathers and Dust, Deep Red, and Mansions, all from Event Horizon Press. In 1994, she won the Staple First Edition writing award resulting in the publication in England of the short story collection, Women who Make Money and the Men Who Love Them. Her Greatest Hits chapbook, which includes her most anthologized poems from 1989-2000, was published by Pudding House. Her work is the subject of the short film Grief Becomes Me, by director Christine Fugate, which was shown as a work-in-progress at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and is included in Grief Becomes Me: A Love Story, the documentary about her life and work. She writes and teaches private workshops in Long Beach, California, where she makes her home.
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April 17, 2014 - Distinguished Writers' Reading at Laguna College of Art and Design. (L to R) Gerald Locklin; LCAD Liberal Arts faculty member, Gwendolyn Oxenham; Charles Harper Webb; Donna Hilbert and Chair of Liberal Arts at LCAD, Grant Hier.
Distinguished Authors Reading Series at Laguna College of Art-Design
Donna Hilbert at Gatsby Books, the last Hump Reading ever!
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With Jo Scott Coe reading for Code Pink at Beyond Baroque
Poem at the First Street Transit Gallery in Long Beach
Click here for more info on Grief Becomes Me
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To contact Donna, send email to donnahilbert@gmail.com