Ernest Hilbert weathers the storms of life and fatherhood
Storm Swimmer, Ernest Hilbert’s fifth collection of poems and winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, is obsessed with bodies of water, especially the ocean. Even before the book begins, Hilbert declares this preoccupation through three sea-based epigraphs, running a wide gamut from Apollonius of Rhodes to Rachel Carson and Iris Murdoch. Over the forty-four formally various and adept poems that comprise this ninety-page, seven-section text, Hilbert engages repeatedly with different aspects of the oceanic to dazzling effect. Often he effects our encounter with the sea through the experiences of the swimmer, who almost always is a struggling figure. Sometimes — as in the case of the title poem — he must contend with the weather: “Without the sun the sea is tangled steel.
