Ernest Hilbert

In recent years Hilbert has composed in his own sonnet form described by Daniel Nester as the "Hilbertian" sonnet. Critic Christopher Bernard refers to them as "loosely formed sonnets, a form that Hilbert has made his own, proving this most classic of forms can contain anything the 21st century can throw at it."[11] In his "Brief Introduction to Versification," which appears as an appendix to The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking, professor James Matthew Wilson describes the Hilbertian sonnet as "a nonce form of the sonnet" with the rhyme scheme ABCABC DEFDEF GG. "While unmetered or only loosely metered, Hilbert's sonnets observe the boundaries of the little room of the sonnet marked by the rhyme scheme quite carefully."[12] Critic Maryann Corbett has written in Rattle that "Hilbert has made the limits tight in a new way. He's created his own Houdini-like set of chains to wriggle out of: a new form that's already known as the Hilbertian sonnet, with the rhyme scheme abc abc def def gg. It's a form designed to grate against the expectations of the reader who is geared to the usual foursquare quatrains in the octaves of the Petrarchan and Shakespearian sonnet forms."[13] Critic and classical scholar Chris Childers wrote in The Hopkins Review that "the structural units of Hilbert's sonnets fall outside the usual parameters of octave-sestet... allowing Hilbert to put the conventional volta (or turn) anywhere or nowhere. The effect is to de-formulaicize and de-familiarize the sonnet’s traditional rhetorical shape, shifting the weight of emphasis off of argument and onto imagery and voice, an effect to which the distant mutedness of the rhymes also contributes."[14]

Several of his sonnets and other poems have been featured by David Lehman on the Best American Poetry website.[15] His poem "Ashore," which appeared in the Yale Review early in 2009, was reprinted by the Academy of American Poets for their August 2009 "Shark Week" feature.[16] "Domestic Situation," "AAA Vacation Guide," and "Prophetic Outlook" are reprinted by the Poetry Foundation.[17]

Hilbert's unpublished collection Cathedral Building, which combines a wide variety of styles and poetic approaches, has been a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry (under the title Removal of the Body), the Barrow Street Press Book Contest, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. It also received an honorable mention for the Dorset Prize.[18] Other books were finalists for the May Swenson Award, the Field Poetry Prize, the Vassar Miller Award, and the Richard Wilbur Award.

Hilbert's poems have been published in literary journals including The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Boston Review, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, and The New Criterion.

In 2009, the Tollund Group, a Nordic translation firm, sponsored its first annual poetry translation prize. Two translations of Hilbert's poems were awarded cash prizes. The winner of the best Danish translation was Mette Bollerup Doyle, who translated Hilbert's "Outsider Art" ("Outsiderens kunst"). The winner for Norwegian translation was Marit Ombudstvedt of Vestby in Norway, who translated "Love Songs" (Kjærlighetssanger"). The judges failed to select a winner in the category of Swedish language.[19] In 2010, four of Hilbert's poems, "City-Scape Gentlemen’s Club, Queens," "Sunrise with Sea Monsters," "Rakewell in TriBeCa," "Dusk in a Crowded Train Compartment, Regretting My Life," were translated into Czech and appeared in the magazine Souvislosti.[20] Hilbert's poem "Nights of 1998," from his second collection, All of You on the Good Earth, was translated into Spanish as "Noches de 1998" in the program for a performance of a musical setting of the poem by Christopher LaRosa at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) in Mexico City, May 29, 2018.[21]

Hilbert's first collection, Sixty Sonnets, was issued by Red Hen Press in early 2009.[22] His second collection, All of You on the Good Earth, was published on March 1, 2013.[22]

His third collection, Caligulan, was published on September 24, 2015 by Measure Press,[23] and was selected as winner of the 2017 Poets' Prize.[24] Rowan Ricardo Phillips wrote that "moved by beauty, attuned to the sublimity of natural things, livened by paradox, coaxed into song by pentameter, Ernest Hilbert's rich new book covers more emotional ground than a reader has any right to expect."[25] Rachel Hadas wrote that the poems in the collection "fashion a stern, witty, and often poignant music out of seemingly unpromising elements courageously glimpsed, combined, or imagined."[26]

His fourth collection, Last One Out, was published by Measure Press in 2019.[27] A. E. Stallings wrote in a review that "Hilbert is enjoying, mid-career, a new formal freedom, and with it, wider territory to cover, or perhaps vice versa," adding "here a certain amount of youthful edge and swagger has been worn away, but is replaced by mastery, depth, and mellowed sweetness."[28]