The Rose in the dust of Steel

    The day is finished; the port is closed.
Some carry fire in red shirts.
  Some make sparks with their bikes.
Some bring boxes of burning words grown from roots
 in the earth. Truckers
     with flaming decals on their trucks.

"The democracy of the dead is, Hill said, a force field in which poetry operates, a situation which he found encapsulated in Ezra Pound’s description of iron filings arranged by the lines of force extending from a magnet as “the rose in the steel dust”." Gabriel Roberts • Oxonian Review

"To whelm is to drown something; to cover it completely with water so as to destroy. To submerge it. So, for Hillman, the grind of late capitalism literally extinguishes our fires." Matt Rader on Brenda Hillman and Geoffrey G. O'Brien• Huffington Post

"To say the poems are meditations is too obvious, except that it is worth saying because such writing is rare; one must say more than that, that the way here as a record in poetic form is unique and, for anyone who has read her poems over decades now, the patient development is of something earned by a kind of stealth." David Hart on Gillian Allnut • Stride

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