Jan 12, 2010
Review: Hill Poems: a Collection of Capitol Hill Poetry
By: AmySchrader Categories: Books Review
[ Hill Poems: A Collection of Capitol Hill Poetry | Jacob Brooke Press ]
{ Hill }
All of the collected poems in this slender anthology are by local poets and take as their topic the Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill. Or as Poets West put it in a Metblog entry from last April, this collection is “about Capitol Hill’s degradation into a yuppie hell and the conversion of apartments to condos and the effect on the community”. Even as a fairly late transplant to the Seattle area I can sympathize with this sentiment. My own neighborhood of Ballard, while admittedly historically more staid than Capitol Hill, has suffered a similar fate over the last eight years. Single-family homes have been sold, torn down, and replaced by cookie-cutter town homes and condos. I hardly recognize my own street anymore.
I like the physical feel of this collection. It contains black and white photos of the Capitol Hill area (Dick’s Drive-In, Broadway Rite Aid, night-lit streets slick with rain) alongside the poetry. The overall effect is to bring to mind a half-mad guerrilla poet xeroxing pages of poems to hand out on the street at 2 a.m., and this has always secretly been my (perhaps overly-romanticized) impression of Capitol Hill.
The table of contents reads like a who’s who of local literary talent: Monica Schley, Carol Guess, Brian McGuigan, Chris Dusterhoff…I have met many of these folks during my tenure in Seattle, and have encountered the work of most of the others. And the poems themselves? They definitely capture the feeling of Capitol Hill, of Seattle, and of the Pacific Northwest in a larger sense.
Of course rain figures heavily in many of the poems. Monica Schley, in “Nocturne #7”, writes:
The rain spoke enigma so close that the music became architecture. I drained down the pipes in a dance of wet leaves…
Characters that will feel familiar to anyone who has visited Capitol Hill make appearances. For example, in Erin Foran’s “Songs Without Words”:
She got on at the hospital,
the corner of Ninth and Jefferson—
the next minute fell off her seat.Booze, maybe, or lack of sleep.
And, from a couple of my favorite poems in the collection, by Carol Guess:
…We made a map of celebrities living in Seattle. The map was blank. This has happened before. We might’ve gone to New York, to Amsterdam, to the edge of the world in a paper boat. (“Saltbox”)
Someone drove past the wrong way on I-5. Above us our exit exploded in horns. We made a deal. Sealed it, bedroom door too tight to squeal. All the room could do was wait for someone to open a window. (“Three on a Match”)
Running across the specificity of local landmarks in a poem always gives me a bit of a thrill, but I particularly admire the way Guess blends these details with the larger wash of urban anonymity. Seattle has always felt exactly like that to me. And I think this collection will make any Seattle-ite nod at least once or twice with recognition.
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For more information about Hill Poems, please contact. jacobbrookepress@live.com
