The Prismatic Eye

Mary Jane Starr was with the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

Doris Hillis’s first collection of poetry, The Prismatic Life, includes over 50 poems, some of which have appeared or will appear in various anthologies and literary revues. The collection is divided into Parts One (Presences and Slow to Touch) and Two (Inevitably, Percussion, and Practices of Death). The arrangement of the poems is very effective — from the solitude of the western Canadian winter (with a liberal sprinkling of hoary-breathed horses tossing manes high) to the bleakness of the human landscape in her native England.

In Part One, the landscape warms slightly from one of the first poems, “Winterstill” where “no wind stirs but cold / drills my forehead” to one of the last, “Planting” where “I go barefoot to sow the spring.” The poems in Part Two, set in wartime England, offer no opportunity for detachment as the poet shifts her focus from the natural world to the human one. Doris Hillis captures perfectly the essence of particular unnamed individuals in poems such as “Twins,” “Mother,” “Father,” “Bengali Immigrant,” and the “Colonel” with his “seething nub of peeve.” Not content with characteristics of the more benign sort, Hillis proceeds to present human nature at its cruelest. Two illustrations suffice: in “Traitress,” “one day masked men came... / and before they left / twisted her arms / snapping them like chicken bones / to make their point”; and in “Joey,” a merciless treatment of a retarded boy by other youngsters, “circling him / then doused him with a slop of gasoline / and someone threw a match / just to see a dummy dance.”

Doris Hillis is exacting in her choice of words and her titles sparkle in their inventiveness. Her prismatic eye offers keen insights into all that falls within its gaze.