In her long-awaited second volume, Mary Stewart Hammond chronicles
a long marriage with sharp wit, dark irony, and poignancy. As James
Merrill says of Hammond's poems, they "brim with what the whole
world knows." Entering History opens on a middle-aged couple,
modern-day travelers in an ancient setting. The collection follows
their relationship through time and place, combining the personal
and the historical in stories of the family-siblings, a daughter,
and the very different marriage of the poet's parents. The marriage
poems share the intimacy, erotic playfulness, irritations, worries,
and angers that are part of an enduring love and a long marriage.
In "Portrait of My Husband Reading Henry James," the poet paints
her husband using syntax and language that evoke James's. In
"Venasque," the wintry village, perched on the edge of a cliff,
serves as a metaphor for the existential crisis facing the couple.
"Lines composed at Beaufort, South Carolina, a few miles above
Parris Island," about the poet's brother, moves back and forth
between the Civil War and the preparations of troops for today's
wars. In "Jacob and Esau with Sister," two brothers, in a
transaction as old as oral history, highlight its consequences in
the twenty-first century. "Anniversary" is a heartbreaking elegy
for a third brother who kills himself. Hammond reaches into the
past and present of the American family, closing Entering History
where it began, with the couple in bed, now older, harkening back
to the bed they shared when they were newlyweds. These powerful,
beautifully crafted, lyrical narratives give depth to an
examination of life-its joys, sorrows, laughter, and tragedies.
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