strong Ernest Hilbert's Last One Out traces the poet's life from childhood memories of his father, both elegiac and nostalgic, to poems of celebration on the birth of his own son. Along the way, myth and history mingle with private reminiscences, drawing the reader from the haunted halls of the Chelsea Hotel to tank-littered Sinai battlefields, the tough streets of Philadelphia to the siege of Leningrad, as he dines with representatives from Vatican Museum, rows in the Oxford dawn, and scales retreating glaciers. This new volume finds Hilbert in his element, always the daring explorer, avid performer, and vexed observer of the terrors and temptations of the mo ..

Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert's first book, Sixty Sonnets , contain memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate lives--failed novelists, forgotten literary critics, cruel husbands, puzzled historians, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, high school dropouts, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems (My love, we know how species run extinct), satires (The way of the human va ..

All of You on the Good Earth guides the reader through chambers occupied by visionary gravediggers and spaced-out movie stars, frenzied dropouts, sullen pirates, and unrelenting stalkers, noble war correspondents and cornered dictators, unlucky drunks and supercilious scientists, impatient goddesses and sad sea monsters, self-indulgent denizens of Plutonian strip-clubs and earnest haunters of ancient ruins, the infamous Rakewell in TriBeCa and sea nymph Kalypso in a beach house at the Jersey shore, characters wandering an America demoralized by economic decline. These poems contain fasts and feasts, laments and love songs, histories, fantasies, and elegies, the ..

Ernest Hilbert's newest poetry collection, Caligulan is heartrending and humorous, filled with love songs and requiems, meditations and memorials, as the poet imagines the ghost of the ruthless Roman emperor Caligula--who ruled over a pagan empire as prosperous as it was unaccountably cruel--looming over modern America, pronouncing his infamous commandment that his victims be killed slowly, "so that they know they are dying." Caligulan is at once terrifying and touching, a book haunted by the poet's many affections and angers, its poems animated by horror films and science fiction novels, heavy metal and opera, remote wilderness and ruined cities. Leaving behind ..