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Long Beach, California poet Donna Hilbert has a big smile and she gives good hugs. I’ve known her for about 40 years, ever since I lived in Long Beach in the 1980s and began running into her at poetry readings. She published six poetry collections prior to Gravity: New & Selected Poems (Tebot Bach, 2018). Then came Threnody (Moon Tide Press, 2022), which bowled me over with its concise music of grief grounded in Hilbert’s habitat of sky and sand and ocean, shorebirds and dogs and humans, treasure and detritus cast up by the sea. The poems of Threnody are very spare and mostly short, sometimes just 3 lines, raw and piercing. Threnody means a song of lamentation, esp. for the dead; a dirge. The dirge – for a husband lost in a violent accident, for a granddaughter, for hatchlings slaughtered by oblivious treetrimmers, for the poet’s mother – is broken here and there with humor, commentaries on daily life, but the overall and remarkably sustained mood is one of mourning, of loss. Now Hilbert has a new collection, Enormous Blue Umbrella (Moon Tide Press, 2025), poems gleaned from paying close attention to what’s around her while also remembering what’s gone. The Umbrella poems are compact and accessible, and they work together to slow and deepen the reader’s breathing. They travel where they need to and they know when they’ve arrived. Hilbert is a great fan of short poems. “Grief,” her first poem to be accepted by ONE ART, a well-respected online literary journal, is only two lines long. “I thought maybe a two-line poem’s an okay thing,” Hilbert told me in a recent conversation. “If you’re not Ezra Pound. Let the little poems roll.” One such piece in Enormous Blue Umbrella is the three-line “Spiritus”: I waken to the sound of breathing so loud I think it’s you beside me. But no, love, it’s me. My breath, alone. Early each morning Hilbert goes for a walk by the ocean, iPhone in hand, to capture images which sometimes direct her writing when she returns home. “I don’t really go out seeking poems. They just come when they are ready to come,” she says. “Usually things will start with almost a voice that will be saying something. And I think that the rhythm of walking encourages that. I was happy to find out that Wallace Stevens was kind of a peregrinator. Usually I’ll come back with something. It might be just a phrase I’ll want to jot down. Or a photo will sometimes spark it. Or I’ll be thinking about something that has nothing to do with my walk at all. Just maybe a snippet of a dream or something vexing me. There’s much to vex one.” Hilbert’s work has been published in many literary journals and in the anthologies Poetry of Presence and The Wonder of Small Things. Since 1989 she has offered a weekly poetry workshop which started through the Long Beach Parks and Recreation Department and continues on a private basis at her home. She also leads occasional classes through organizations such as the Eastern Shores Writers Association and Write On, Door County, a residency program in Wisconsin where she spends a month each year. She lives in a house on the Long Beach Peninsula and stays in close touch with her three grown sons, eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. A granddaughter who committed suicide haunts recent poems. “It’s not my story to tell how this came about,” Hilbert says. “You know, young people struggle to find themselves, and we don’t live in a society that is very helpful to that. It’s something I’ll never get over. But the only story I could tell was my own grief.” Summer Solstice again. One year, we waded into the sea to wash crystals. (It was all about feng shui.) The water was cold, the sky, cloud gray. Back in the house, you fingered your name onto the foggy windows, with hearts for O’s, frames, and punctuation. I took a photo of this. Now, it’s proof you were here, and for a time, happy. (from Enormous Blue Umbrella) Hilbert’s husband, Larry, the father of her children, died when he was struck by a car in 1998. He turns up in poems that remember happy times, marital difficulties and the horror of his death. When I suggest that her husband has been her muse, she agrees. “Absolutely. More in death than in life, really,” she says. Her current long-term partner, a filmmaker she prefers not be named, turns up in some Hilbert poems, but differently. “We’re completely self-sustaining individuals,” Hilbert says. “And without children to raise.” Enormous Blue Umbrella is divided into five sections. The poems’ brevity pulls the reader along, and the pieces build on each other. The book contains odes to Hilbert’s favorite purple pen, her iron skillet, a stapler and other familiar objects, as well as poems about and for loved ones. “It’s kind of every day,” Hilbert says of her process. “It’s what I’m doing and loving at the moment.” She lives simply, on assets from her long-ago marriage. “You know, one good thing about being brought up without any money to speak of, just working, saving, putting your money in little envelopes, I never developed any exotic tastes and I hate to shop more than anything,” Hilbert says. “I used to tell my husband, boy you could not have married a less expensive woman. “When I’ve got it, I spend it, if it’s something I actually want. The thing is, I just don’t want very much. What I like to do is walk, swim, write, read. And to cook, thank goodness.” Near the end of Umbrella comes a poem that expresses both Hilbert’s embrace of the world and her knowledge that her time is limited. What I Would Miss What I would miss most are moments like this: favorite pen in my hand gliding the page as if the pen were a skater on a rink made of paper, morning coffee hot shock on my tongue. (from Enormous Blue Umbrella) I hope Donna Hilbert is around and writing for many years to come. Her work is always worth reading.