Slow Ascent

What the critics say:

Hilles’ last novel, A Gradual Ruin, has been widely praised:

“Compelling, emotionally engaging, and intellectually stimulating. The novel ends in a way that manages to be inevitable, surprising and deeply satisfying at the same time: a terrific accomplishment. ”
National Post

“A tightly written, muscular epic.” Edmonton Journal

“Graphic and mesmerizing in its detail. Unforgettable.”
Alistair MacLeod

If Canada had a poet laureate, Calgary’s Robert Hilles would be a candidate. Hilles is a genuine people’s poet.
The Calgary Herald

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An excerpt from A Slow Ascent

I study a photograph from 1940

Uncertain if the man in it is my father

Because a shadow covers his face.

But I immediately recognize his hands

Crossed at the wrist and supporting a propped shotgun.

It’s a photo taken to prove he’d killed something.

But it’s his hands that matter now.

He hunted often as a young man

And years later told me

How he loved the slow ascent

Of a flock of mallards over Longbow Lake

Their wings gripped the air

Like fingers the edge of a cliff

As they lifted through air as solid as ground.

He’d track their progress with his shotgun

Until they were fully in flight

Then he’d shoot one of the stragglers.

That bird, heavy and earth bound,

Would drop so quickly

My father barely had time

To send the dog

Who luckily knew exactly

Where to go.

In the photo, he leans back

Maybe a little afraid of all that happens next.

I know most of that now

Could tell him what to watch out for

But that might nudge him

Away from me altogether.

He has been dead these ten years.

But seeing that photograph brings back the pain.

The dead leave so little behind

To be glimpsed only here and there

Until that too is gone.

What I am drawn to most

In the photograph are his hands.

I remember how near the end of his life

They started to shake

And I would try to steady them

But as soon as I took mine away

His began shaking again.

“Never mind,” he’d say,

“I’ve gotten used to it.”

And would light a smoke

And for that brief moment

While he held the lighter

Against the tip of his cigarette

His hands didn’t shake

And he could have been mistaken

For a younger man.

Wrapped Within Again
New and Selected Poems

Robert Hilles' fifteenth book, and twelfth book of poetry, continues his fascination with the complexities of daily life. The new book features a major selection of poems from Robert Hilles previous eleven books of poetry, as well a generous number of new poems. For the first time in on one volume readers are able to have the best poems spanning his career to date. Throughout this volume, the Governor General’s Award-winning poet writes poems that are at times philosophical, tender, and sensual. His poems always strive to find the light in even the darkest of subjects. Although his poetry is candid and does not shy away from difficult subjects, it always maintains a sense of hope, a sense of healing.

ISBN 0-88753-384-1

This is a book with honesty and down-to-earth insights into family and personalities. It hides nothing. It gives everything.
Southam News

This is Robert Hilles' tenth book of poetry. In it, he returns with a new collection of lyric and prose poems that explores the tension between the intimacy loved ones strive for and the day to day challenges that interfere with their intentions. At a particularly chaotic period in his life, the author playfully spun a fortune wheel, asking, "What does the next year hold?" Ironically, the arrow stopped somewhere between obstacles and pleasure. Struck by the poetic accuracy of his fortune, Hilles attempts to translate to the page the deep emotion and ordinary magic that underlies his ability to traverse the often-enigmatic course set before him.

The poetry is about everyday life, the chaos in a family, the love one has for someone new, and it also delves into childhood memories, the things that went wrong as well as the small triumphs and joys. This is a book about everyday and everyday dreams. 

ISBN 0-88753-327-2
$17.95

Kissing The Smoke

A collection of meditations laced with wry, self-effacing humour.
Calgary Herald

Hilles' beautifully plain prose rummages gently but firmly into everydayhearts, subjecting their contest to clear-eyed and compassionate reflection. Kissing the Smoke says more about men, grieving families, and work thanmany grander books on these subjects.
Calgary Weekly

"There are certain lies that get told because people like the sound of them. Poetry can be such a lie. It can tell the truth too, in such away that some might think it a lie,"Hilles muses in Kissing The Smoke. A candid account of grief and joy, Kissing The Smoke is a collection of stories, lyrically written, that is defiantly self-aware.

Hilles reveals in diary entries and scenes that thereis poetry to be found in living and dying. The story he tells here, in the form of various "careers" is on about both his father and himself.

ISBN 0-88753-283-7
$15.95

Near Morning

The stories in this book are evocative and powerful and sometimessad.
Calgary Herald

Hilles explores the roots of childhood, relationships and living on the fringe. The stories in this book are connected by memories and impressions. It gives one the sense of what it was like growing up in the late 1950s,the bewilderment of childhood and of struggling with adolescence. It also paints a picture of rural Canada and the urban pressures that were being felt, even then.

ISBN 0-88753-271-3
128 pages $16.95

Raising of VoicesRaising of Voices

Winner of the Writer's Guild of Alberta Georges Bugnet Award forthe best work of fiction, Raising of Voices is a loose narrativeof one family's journey through madness and alcoholism to love. Daniel's world is torn apart, first by his father's drinking and then, by his mother'smadness. But through all the pain, an understanding takes shape.

Set in the bush in Kenora, Ontario, the landscape is a haunting presence through the book.

$14.95
ISBN 0-88753-272-1