Saskia Hamilton

A TLS, SPECTATOR AND TIME MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023FINALIST FOR THE NBCC AWARD FOR POETRY 2023'Celebrating the incredible moral clarity, beauty, fearlessness and power of the spirit of Saskia Hamilton - and of her poetry' Jorie Graham'Full of delicate and muscular truths and graced with rare intelligence, this posthumous volume offers the gifts of a uniquely sensitive mind' Publisher's Weekly (starred review)'To read Saskia Hamilton's opening poem in her forthcoming collection, All Souls, is to move through time in acts of seeing and of noting what is seen . . . For now, the day seems to say, Let the ordinary amaze, it's the grace we hold . . . Hamilton rests her sights on what can be apprehended from a bed, sofa, chair, or window, and named in the quotidian. These small recognitions ensure a life's weightiness, wariness, worthiness' Claudia RankineWho becomes familiar with mortalillness for very long. I was a stranger, &c.Not everyone appreciates it, noone finds being the third personbecoming, it's never accurate,and then one is headed for the past tense.Futurity that was once a lark, a gamble,a chance messenger, traffic and trade, under sail.The boy touches your arm in his sleepfor ballast. It's warm in the hold. Betweenship and sky, the bounds of sightalone, sphere so bounded.-from 'All Souls'In All Souls, Saskia Hamilton transforms compassion, fear, expectation, and memory into art of the highest order. Judgment is suspended as the poems and lyric fragments make an inventory of truths that carry us through night's reckoning with mortal hope into daylight. But even daylight - with its escapements and unbreakable numbers, 'restless, / irregular light and shadow, awakened' - can't appease the crisis of survival at the heart of this collection. Marked with a new openness and freedom - a new way of saying that is itself a study of what can and can't be said-the poems give way to Hamilton's mind, and her unerring descriptions of everyday life: 'the asphalt velvety in the rain.'The central suite of poems vibrates with a ghostly radioactive attentiveness, with care unbounded by time or space. Its impossible charge is to acknowledge and ease suffering with a gaze that both widens and narrows its aperture. Lightly told, told without sentimentality, the story is devastating. A mother prepares to take leave of a young son. Impossible departure. 'A disturbance within the order of moments.' One that can't be stopped, though in these poems language does arrest and in some essential ways fix time.Tenderness, courage, refusal, and acceptance infuse this work, illuminating what Elizabeth Hardwick called 'the universal unsealed wound of existence.'

* FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY * In All Souls, Saskia Hamilton transforms compassion, fear, expectation, and memory into art of the highest order. Judgment is suspended as the poems and lyric fragments make an inventory of truths that carry us through night's reckoning with mortal hope into daylight. But even daylight--with its escapements and unbreakable numbers, "restless, / irregular light and shadow, awakened"--can't appease the crisis of survival at the heart of this collection. Marked with a new openness and freedom--a new way of saying that is itself a study of what can and can't be said--the poems give way to Hamilton's mind, and her unerring descriptions of everyday life: "the asphalt velvety in the rain." The central suite of poems vibrates with a ghostly radioactive attentiveness, with care unbounded by time or space. Its impossible charge is to acknowledge and ease suffering with a gaze that both widens and narrows its aperture. Lightly told, told without sentimentality, the story is devastating. A mother prepares to take leave of a young son. Impossible departure. "A disturbance within the order of moments." One that can't be stopped, though in these poems language does arrest and in some essential ways fix time. Tenderness, courage, refusal, and acceptance infuse this work, illuminating what Elizabeth Hardwick called "the universal unsealed wound of existence."

"Hamilton is able to sustain a complex narrative through stripped-down poems . . . leavened by a wry humor." --The New York Times Book Review I wanted to read an essay in your wrist. The afternoon seemed endless. Out the window, a lane to the right was bending away, taking with it the figure moving down it. Alone for a quarter of an hour, looking in, plotting the argument, all the marks of lucidity and brevity in that attempt, that benefit of rhetoric: the true but unlikely moment. --from "Summered" Corridor, Saskia Hamilton's third collection, is a study of motion and time. Its glanced landscapes, its lives seen in passing, render the immeasurable in broken narratives. These poems are succinct in order to travel quickly--they have unexpected distances within their reach. They are dauntless and alert in their apprehension of the natural kingdom at the frontier of so many unnatural ones. And they inhabit the realm of contemplation which, for Hamilton, is charged with eros.

Poet Saskia Hamilton, author of As for Dream, explores "where the pull of reverie becomes palpable and eerily seductive" (Poetry). Only night First light I will not quite fit in this hole nor you with your long fingers --from "Divide These" These spare, evocative poems register things at the edge of our attention that confound our systems of belief. In Divide These, Saskia Hamilton brings delicate observation together with riveting assertion to make an original, unsettling music.

A series of brief, haunting lyrics and prose fragments, the poems in "As for Dream" hover in suspension between states of consciousness or being. Hamilton's verse both illustrates and investigates the human experience at many different intervals: as we wake from the dream world, as we meet the loss or disruption of our desires, as we tend to the ill, and as we die. Once we cross those boundaries, does the self remain intact? These poems record and question moments when we slip from the casing of the body and the social world and try to make our way back, or find we cannot.