Absence is one of those commonplace words that can prove oddly resistant to definition -- partly because there are so many varying forms of absence, from temporary (going off for a walk around the block) to the most permanent, notably death. The poems in this book undertake the work of defining absence in a number of contexts, most painfully that of the premature death of a child.  

To Accompany A Gift of Flowers
still, for Niki

'Something new,' you said; 'Not roses.'
So I picked out these, nameless to me,
streaked pink, orchidean. I suppose

you'll centre the table with them: three
spindle-stemmed flowers, stamens stretched
toward the sun, tentative, lewd. We

speak, sometimes, this bloom-language,
more sensible to you. And if it tells
more than I mean, less than I want, that's

much of the point. You've trained me well,
and it's no little wonder, given my 
wordy reticence. Out of these small

unknowing habits maybe a love is built,
O flower of my life, O nearest bloom -
keep them until and after they wilt

and keep me longer, in the absolute
centre of your wide heart's room.

© Copyright John Hildebidle, 1999

Harvard Review, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fall 2000 issue.
My favorite poem in Defining Absence is called "Skater." Its subject is a man, seen from a distance, working hard at figure skating; I take it to be both Hildebidle's self-portrait and his ars poetica. In the poem's first stanza the poet watches as the skater moves "in sudden turns he doesn't pretend are easy/since he thinks no one is watching his arms/swing as if a hidden flight of hawks beset him" (35). This poem does not admire effortlessness, it celebrates exertion and concentration, the possession of "purpose [that] -- knows progress is restrained falling, a balance of idea and lapse" (35). "Restrained falling" describes the feel of the poem's own formal progress, as it creates eighteen lines out of two sinuous, hypotactic sentences.
     At the center of the book lies the alternation of restraint from and falling into the grief that Hildebidle has lived with ever since the death of an infant daughter. He describes that experience in spare but painful detail in a series called "Poems for a Lost Daughter." Material so personal, and handled so directly, is dangerous territory for a book of poems; the reader's sympathy is easily secured, but sympathy can obscure aesthetic pleasure, even hinder it if the reader feels emotionally coerced.
     Fortunately, this is not a problem for Hildebidle's readers. He creates in these poems memorable, sharp-edged representations of disorder and loss that present the author's grief in its dignity, complexity, and essential privacy. Hildebidle lets his images speak for themselves, as in "Geology." The first of this poem's three parts describes a beach that poet and his wife visit before their daughter's birth. They see there a rock "footed in sand, exactly/curved for a back-rest" (16). When they return years later with "sad ashes" for scattering and burying, "the rock's cracked in two,/halves tilting away from the other -- for us to take as a sign/that the permanent is only accidental,/or maybe the imagination's work" (19). The trust that Hildebidle has built up with his moving and unpretentious poems is such that the image of the split rock seems both literally believable and tonally appropriate.
     That balance of persuasive detail and lyrical nuance characterizes the collection, whether Hildebidle is musing on "Not Learning to Juggle," or imagining Freud's disappointment at visiting America for the first time in "Freud in the Woods." This is a poet who feels at home wherever his mind takes him, a comfort reflected in the generous eclecticism of his subject matter. The reader leaves Defining Absence with a full sense of how richly Hildebidle must feel his everyday life. Even better, she comes away renewed in the conviction that though everyone may not be able to make poetry out of his or her life, each of our lives is the stuff of poetry.  Heather White

"The absence referred to  by the poet in a major part of this collection is that of his daughter, Caroline, who died shortly after her birth in 1985. He muses on the impossibility of forgetting her . . . but though these memories are painful, more painful by far to the poet is the 'final loss' of total forgetfulness."
  Boston Irish Reporter, November 1999

"Hildebidle uses language both sparse and lyrical, and particularly effective. . ."
  Irish Emigrant, October 1999

"DEFINING ABSENCE is really an odyssey of a parent's grief. . .  It is to the poet's credit that poems in such a highly subjective collection reflect the depth of loss he feels, but at the same time, never descend to the maudlin. This is a very moving and thought-provoking collection."
  Local Ireland News (World Wide Web), autumn 1999