Wallace Stevens wrote that the poet's "role is to help people to live their lives. He has immensely to do with giving life whatever savor it possesses." Stevens might have been describing the poetry of Conrad Hilberry, a poetry forged, like Stevens's, as a way of adding "savor" to a scrupulously ordered, carefully observed life spent mostly in the Midwest, a life of teaching, reading, and domestic continuity, a life in which nothing spectacular happened. Hilberry has led a life of conscious modesty and has a distrust of personality.

Conrad Arthur Hilberry was born on 1 March 1928 in Melrose Park, Illinois, and grew up in Ferndale, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. He was the son of Clarence (a teacher who became president of Wayne State University) and Ruth Haase Hilberry. Clarence Hilberry's father was a Methodist minister in northern Ohio who often moved with his family.

According to Conrad...