'Celebrating the incredible moral clarity, beauty, fearlessness and
power of the spirit of Saskia Hamilton - and of her poetry' Jorie
Graham '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 Rankine Who
becomes familiar with mortal illness for very long. I was a
stranger, &c. Not everyone appreciates it, no one finds being
the third person becoming, 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 sleep for ballast. It's warm in the hold. Between
ship and sky, the bounds of sight alone, 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.'
General
Imprint: |
Corsair
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Release date: |
November 2023 |
Authors: |
Saskia Hamilton
|
Dimensions: |
216 x 153 x 22mm (L x W x T) |
Pages: |
96 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-4721-5874-1 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-4721-5874-1 |
Barcode: |
9781472158741 |
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