All Souls
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
* 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.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The masterful fifth collection from Hamilton (Corridor), who died this year, explores the roles of memory, motherhood, reading, and writing in the arc of a life. Divided into four lyric sequences that offer equal parts self-reflection and intellectual luminosity, these poems richly capture shifts in thoughts, and questions and reconsiderations upon closer reading. She alludes to writers (among them Proust, William Cowper, and critic Christopher Ricks), creating a chorus of minds wrestling with existential and aesthetic queries ("Is there point to critical interpretation/ that gives us ‘what we all know already, what/ inescapably and instantly strikes/ the eye' "). Speculation is grounded in experience, "I spent the hours that season/ in a basement library magnifying/ Bishop's hand ten times to read the word/ ‘tidal.' " The book's final section, "Museum Going," offers a memorable exploration of museum attendance, family memory, and Proust: "Our mother told us to stand anywhere in the gallery and the eyes of the young woman with the earring would find us"; "When my grandfather leaned on his cane, the floor would give a little." Full of delicate and muscular truths and graced with rare intelligence, this posthumous volume offers the gifts of a uniquely sensitive mind.
