by Brenda Hillman.

Wesleyan. 87 pages. $22.95.

BY TOM D’EVELYN

Special to the Journal

With this work, Brenda Hillman joins the immortal masters of the game.

This is her seventh book and the second of a projected tetralogy on the four “building blocks” of the universe, earth-air-fire-water. The first volume, Cascadia (Wesleyan 2001), mapped her California’s history, natural and political and personal. It made history, literally and figuratively.

Hillman is a serious poet. But getting “into” her poetry requires a relaxed, open mind, not unlike the mind one adopts for listening to jazz. Empty the mind, listen to the heart, stay loose.

Pieces of Air in the Epic is her most musical book yet. “Pieces of Air” does indeed suggest music. Inside, she refers to “our tiny tinny song.” Hillman loves to play with sound: “fsss” goes the “night sprinkler.”

Like good jazz, Hillman’s poetry quotes other poetries; here the epics of Virgil and Homer for starters. It’s a political book, yes. Current events swirl around: “The submarine Kursk, its night full of embalmed men used by the state” — that in a definition of poetry out of Aristotle.

Collage has never danced so hard.

Desperately hard sometimes. “How does one write when the laws that limit power have failed.” No question mark.

Sound provokes sense: “A robin had been feeding her isosceles-headed babies, / Their brief don’t-let-me cries aflutter . . .” The music of “let” is nicely voiced there.

In short, Hillman is a master composer. The thrust-and-counterthrust of her lines, regardless of the “content,” rarely fails to surprise and compel. In continuum, the sounds travel ahead of the sense, clearing the way; sounds build on each other, creating radiant rooms. She creates “threads” of sound even as she sees herself as a seamstress, and puns on seem/seam.

Her experiments in graphics (some critics find these counter-productive) often open new aesthetic spaces. “String Theory Sutra,” one of the longer poems, is astonishingly beautiful. Ravi Shankar meets Ornette Coleman meets Bill Evans.

Hillman’s accomplishment here is so refreshing! In critic Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s words, “This rhythmic alternation between sound and word, between sensation and representation, is not ‘inside’ poetry; it is poetry.”

Blasing’s new book, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (Princeton, 216 pages, $35) applies her theory to Eliot, Stevens, Pound and Sexton. The bodily roots of lyric intensity have never been so persuasively set forth.