Denison University's Beck Series presents its Spring 2024 schedule. The Beck Series brings award-winning authors to Denison, for the entire community to enjoy.
The Beck Series welcomes poet Brenda Hillman presenting a reading. Hillman has published more than ten collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press. In five of her most recent collections, “Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days” (2018); “Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire” (2013); “Practical Water” (2009), “Pieces of Air in the Epic” (2005), and “Cascadia” (2001), each book receives her ‘sustained attention’ to one the natural elements. A Publishers Weekly starred review of “Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days” elucidates, “Having written four previous books each addressing one of the four traditional elements of nature, here she considers wood as a fifth element, making her hieroglyphic way through ‘forests of grief’ as might one of the book’s beloved beetles, ‘pressing/ their whole jeweled bodies/ in the beauty of the bark.’ Neither simply empirical nor transcendental, Hillman’s poetry takes what she calls ‘woodmind’—a sort of deep attention to natural processes—and applies it to notions of human action, recollection, imagination, and craft.” Her most recent collection, “In a Few Minutes Before Later” (2022), is her third book about time.