Tilting at Windmills – new debut collection

There is a deftness and certainty to the poems in Tilting at Windmills. Hares’ voice is both political and environmental, yet it also encompasses a deep empathy for all that makes us human. From swimming robots, to talking freezers; from tightrope walkers to rhubarb pickers, the poems in the book’s six parts both live in their own world and are part of the main. With something of Bishop’s eye for ‘no detail too small’, Hares takes our hand and guides us through what we have lost and are yet to lose. After all, as she says, ‘‘this is not a rehearsal’. And yet, there is also hope: ‘See how fast the sky heals behind us.’ This is an assured collection from
a poet in whose company we are fortunate to linger, and to whom we should listen with courage and with care.

Claire Dyer, Poet and Novelist

In these very readable, wide-ranging and hard-hitting poems Hilary Hares uses potent visual imagery and detail to explore many aspects of the contemporary world. Irony blends with humour in a poem describing a demonstration about the need for clean water, another features the freezer compartment in her fridge denying climate change. In At zero hour ‘enormous marble fish flip themselves out of polluted pools’. Poems later in the book hit very hard. David Attenborough interviews the last of the orangutans features the terrified animal making a heartbreaking stand. The book ends on a note of hope and includes the splendid poem The Great Pacific Garbage Patch onto which ‘algae and plankton, bi-valves and barnacles’ clung wherever ‘they could find purchase,/ travelling in hope, with seed in their bellies’. Aptly titled, Tilting at Windmills, the book is a remarkable first full collection which should appeal to many readers.

Myra Schneider, Poet and Writer

Tilting at Windmills is a wide-ranging and accessible collection that moves confidently through time and place with natural elegance and a real sense of purpose. What is above all admirable is the clarity and coherence of each poem enhanced by Hares’ instinctive feel for rhythm and cadence. Even when she is dealing with a ‘big idea’ such as the climate emergency, her images are focused relentlessly upon its concrete and immediate effects, so that, like ‘the sturdy bridge’ she evokes in one of her poems, we feel that she truly ‘speaks to us’.

David Cooke, Editor of The High Window