Month's Mind

Anne Burke is the editor of the Prairie Journal Press.

The origin of the title is Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
referring to a requiem. The saying “having a month’s mind” means
to express a fervent desire. Eros and Thanatos, or the love and death
drive, is a dualism that Hicks uncovers in his classical sources, and
compulsively retells. His long poem “Fireflies” is based on an
incident Hicks experienced, “Hence—at some remove—the poem,” he
explains. “At some remove” is the operative in his aesthetic.

Hicks is “a modern metaphysical poet,” which seems, at first
glance, to be an oxymoron. However, he has proven this in other works
Sticks and Stones, Fives and Sixes, and elsewhere. The 78 poems in this
collection do nothing but augment it. The title poem waxes Arcadian and
there are the shades of the masters at every footfall. Technically Hicks
attempts some innovation with “Interludes” (a prose poem) and
visually with “Prairie Interview”: “Let us spread ourselves /
somewhere on a flat / uninhabited mile, / and bounce our posings, / our
responses, / off the engulfing blue / of a satellite sky.”